


Canis Aureus, Redux!

by leosaysgrrrr, LePetitChouNerd



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Redemption, Revenge, Romance, Slow Burn, action adventure, frenemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2018-12-01 03:16:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11477484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leosaysgrrrr/pseuds/leosaysgrrrr, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LePetitChouNerd/pseuds/LePetitChouNerd
Summary: [Reyes Squadmate AU] Reyes Vidal was only seven years old when he watched Alec Ryder kill his father. Years later, Cerberus makes him an offer he can't refuse and the machinations of vengeance begin. Old wounds and a new galaxy - the job was easy enough. If only Sarianna Ryder stayed out of the way...





	1. Bang! You're Dead

It was barely sunrise when Reyes peeked through the closet door and watched his father stare down a smoking gun. 

“This could’ve been easy,” said the strange man. His helmet had already broken off – shot off, in fact – long ago, when the fighting broke out three levels below. Now most of his armor blended with the shadows. Shiny black metal streaked with a deep red tint, charred here and there from a wandering thermal clip. Nothing save the subtle logo shining against the chiaroscuro shadows could reach Reyes’s struggling eyes. _N7_ , it read.

His father spat chunks of blood on his prized Venetian rug. “Fuck off, Alec.” His arms were half raised above his head as he knelt on the floor. There was no doubt to his defeat; no question about how his story would end. Reyes knew that look – that darkly defiant, menacing look of a man who had already paid that price long ago. “Just be done with it.” 

Reyes could feel his chest squeeze tightly. He instinctively covered his mouth with both hands, suppressing the tremble of a whimper.

“I’m sorry, Carlos,” the stranger apologized with a heaviness that cut deeper than even the fear paralyzing the boy hiding in the closet. He raised his gun so it was centered on Senator Vidal’s forehead. 

“My wife!” he cried out in between tortured, protracted breaths. “...And my son.” He raised glowering eyes to his executioner. “What will the Alliance do with them?”

For a while, nothing save Carlos’s jagged breaths filled the moments in between the question and answer. His eyes were no longer at the gun pointed at him but up at the man who held the only thing that mattered.

The man named Alec looked back down with a grim silence, contemplating just how much pity he felt. But his hand remained steadfast. It was only his lower lip that quivered, ready with an answer. 

“Nothing.” Whatever reluctance he had evanesced with the finality of his answer. His finger squeezed the trigger.

A split second. A deafening _bang_.

Barely a flash lit the room before Reyes could see that his father’s brains stained his prized Venetian rug, and pieces of his skull had flown to far-flung corners of the gilded room – as far as the sole of Reyes’s shoe.

 

* * *

 

Hot pink was the last phosphorescent thing Reyes expected, but it was precisely the color that kept Omega sleepless. Garish and aglow, the lights often blinked along the surface of murky puddles and mired window panels. Often a spry green bulb or neon blue flash would contour the otherwise shadowy contrasts of the city’s streets, but pink seemed to rule the night.

It flared obscenely enough. Every time a skittish figure traipsed across the bar and past the spotlight, it cast unruly shadows over the counter, and he was very much obliged to wipe it clean lest the boss would catch him neglecting the coasters. But fear of such a possibility did nothing to reform his behavior. Reyes forgot it anyway when serving drinks, and considering the never-ending influx of alcoholics trying to solve their problems in the bottom of an unclean glass, he had no time. So he stuck to the endless cycle. Pour the drink every time the pink light flickered, and wipe the glass dry.

“By all accounts, you’re a little too young to be tending bar.”

Reyes let out an unamused smirk. Wide enough so it didn’t offend, but pursed enough to convey a plain rejection. It happened often enough in a place like Omega that he shouldn’t be surprised. “Are you going to order a drink?”

The stranger said nothing, not even a smile. Another patron beside him passed by, and suddenly the spotlight seemed to wax over his hunched-over figure. A clean black suit with military style-straps running diagonal from the collar; for the evening he wore his head bare save for the cleanly combed over hair that draped over the ridge of his brows. His straight-back posture would have hinted to some military background – perhaps a high-ranking officer with the alliance – but soldiers didn’t carry suitcases. Neither did they sit tightlipped in the seediest bar so insignificant that even its real estate prospects remained untouched by the great Aria T’Loak.

He caught the look of surprise in Reyes’s eyes, and so he wasted no time reaching into his jacket pocket. Out came a sleek, glossy business card. It shone a metallic blue against the hot pink light, brandishing a white polygonal figure flanked by two golden lines.

“Cerberus,” he said without explanation before handing Reyes the card.

“That your name?” the bartender asked blithely. His brows curled with his thinned out patience. He threw the card back on the counter as if in disgust. “If you don’t mind, I have customers to-...” 

But the moment he uttered the words, a silence seemed to overtake the counter and seats around this... “Cerberus” figure. It was as if all noise and life were siphoned away, to some distant corner in the darkness where thrumming music reigned. 

The stranger took advantage of his astonishment by digging back into his jacket pocket for a cigarette. The evidently hand rolled tobacco came in a silver case, thin and lustrous as it came from the black fabric of the coat pocket. With one flick of his thumb, a lighter produced a small flame, and soon the embers glowed with his subtle inhalation. He then raised his left forearm in front of him as he blew out smoke. The interface of his omnitool lit abuzz, like a beacon smothered by gaudy lights and overbearing shadows.

“Reyes Vidal,” he read aloud from the omnitool screen. “Sixteen years old. Father, Carlos Vidal, deceased. Mother, Teresa Vidal, still living. Formerly enrolled in the Alliance Navy Academy for the Gifted in Ahnur. Records show you were a star pupil. Aced all your exams, even the impossible simulation test, but you were expelled right before graduation.” He punctuated Reyes’s life summary with an aloof exhalation. The smoke circled in rings around them, and not even Reyes could stand comfortably silent amidst the exposition.

“A pity,” the stranger added after a bout of silence. “Seems you had talent.”

“What do you want?” Reyes asked with a bit of a growl.

The stranger smiled, for once donning an expression in the entire time they had their stilted conversation. He turned his head and glanced over both his shoulders.

Reyes followed his suit and noticed that the bar was near empty. It was only two in the morning. That was usually peak traffic for them.

“It’s not what _I_ want, Mr. Vidal.”

For his part, Reyes was a little more unnerved. He hadn’t been called Mr. Vidal by anyone ever, much less heard it in such stylized formality. The last time he could think of was-... Well...

“It’s what my employers want,” the stranger continued. “They make sure to keep an eye on talent of the...-” his grin grew wider as he searched the air around Reyes for the word, “... _exceptional_ kind.” He let the word linger for a while before webbing his fingers together, his elbows pitched to the bar counter. He didn’t seem to care that the residues of beer and liquor were sullying his tailored suit from over the surface.

“And you work for-...?”

The agent winked at the card before putting a hand over it and sliding it back to Reyes. “Cerberus.”

The name was more than familiar, all things considered. All children – even destitute ones like him – were schooled well enough in the arcane and archaic lore of ages past. Still, the name evoked more a guard dog than some shady business, and given the hour of the night, Reyes preferred counting money from potential customers than sifting in his mind to figure out obscure references. “Just make it quick,” he barked in low tones. “I’m pretty sure it was _you_ who scared all the customers.”

To that the stranger chuckled. “Talent like you shouldn’t be beholden to such filth.” Somehow the tone of his voice was cheeriest when speaking such acerbic words. But he saw how quickly Reyes furrowed his brows, near ready to call out the bouncer or even the boss.

It was more than likely that neither could physically throw the stranger out, but something in his gut curled at the rather bleak prospects of it. “Out with it,” he said, rather resigned to the situation at hand.

With a sly grin, the stranger spoke in lower yet nonetheless reverberating tenor. “One day, with much effort I am sure, you will learn tact. Someone else will come to teach you that.” His cigarette was burning to its end. The cinders fell with the bits of ash as he flicked it over the counter, careless of the mess yet nevertheless looking gentlemanly for his aloofness. “Today, I want to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

The hot pink sheen of the spotlight seemed to cast a discoloration on the stranger’s black suit. He looked a bit keen with it, Reyes thought, as if basking in the overwhelming pervasiveness of the tawdry color.

“Tonight, you’ll finish working your bar. You’ll earn your money. But in the next day, you walk back to a recruitment office and re-enroll into the Alliance Navy Academy. The one on Arcturus Station, specifically.”

Reyes made a move so as to protest – an instinct fitting for a pauper prince so unused to directives issued out by shady businessmen. But the other immediately waved a pointed finger as if to silence all remonstrance.

“You will take the courses you need, pass – no, _ace_ all your exams, and you _will_ become a certified pilot.” He paused to briefly ash his burnt out cigarette stub onto the counter. The wood seemed to let out a muted cackle as the varnish took in its cinders. “You will _then_ formally enlist as an Alliance Navy pilot.”

The stranger hunched forward, letting Reyes look down on the black pools of his eyes. “All that we ask is that you give us information from time to time; _retrieve_ things when we ask. Or – god forbid, if the time comes – even answer a call to arms.”

A vacuous silence followed after the final word, and soon it became apparent to Reyes that the room had been emptied out. Devoid of the din and the clang of noisy glass swirling with untamed spills. His own eyes darted around, but whatever suspicion he felt eased the tension in his jaw. Something about the look in the stranger’s eyes gleamed an elusively knowing sheen. Trust wasn’t a matter of checking one’s premises or keeping one foot on the ground. At that moment, Reyes felt trust was an issue of language. It was all in the aloof roasting of undoubtedly expensive tobacco; the untouched shot glass of gin sitting ignored and neglected by the stranger’s elbow; and the rather effortlessly kept countenance of man whose station was so high that not even the muck and grime of the poor disgusted him. The man spoke a language Reyes knew, a language he didn’t realize he still understood.

“What’s in it for me?” Reyes folded his arms over one another, pressed against his chest in a way that pushed his spine back to a lengthier stance. He hung his head back, letting the pinkish glow of the spotlight hover like a crown over his head. “If I’m going to be doing all that,” he continued, “what’s in it for me?”

Something of a crooked smile emerged from the stranger’s otherwise deadpan expression. He leaned forward once more, weaving his fingers together in a habit so indicative of delighted contemplation. Reyes’s question pleased him, no doubt. For someone so young, there was a piquant way with which he handled such a serendipitous yet arbitrary proposal. “Didn’t I say that this is an offer you can’t refuse?”

That the question was rhetorical was plain as day. What Reyes didn’t expect, however, was the rather glib and speedy way with which he disposed of trivialities.

“Ten years ago, Senator Carlos Vidal was found dead in the study of his home.” The stranger lit another cigarette, focusing his eyes on the small flame that burned the paper. “Of course, home is an understatement. He was ... an obscenely rich man.” The cigarette seemed to burn brighter at the word “obscenely,” as if the mere weight of it fanned the flames all on its own. “He was survived by his wife and child, declared missing by the Anhur, Citadel, and Omega security services.”

Though Reyes kept his visage calm and collected, he couldn’t help but grind his teeth together to ease a bit of the irritation. News of his family’s “status” according to official reports was a joke – a lesson that one’s sins, once washed with blood, will stain others along the way. Family was no exception. But he kept silent, waiting to hear the punch line to his proposition.

“Now, I’m a business man. I follow money. I _worship_ money. And you see, Senator Vidal was _obscenely_ rich,” he lingered on the word, nearly pressing together his left thumb and forefinger together to pinch at the delicacy of it. “By all rights, his family should have had every penny of it. Every bond, every stock, and every flake of gold you could scrape between his teeth...” 

His cheeks felt taut. Pulled and stretched with the clenching of his jaws. It was one thing to have one’s talent be the lure, and wholly another to have one’s poverty flaunted and dangled like a badge of shame. Reyes lacked, for sure, but he never lacked for dignity. “Fuck off.”

The stranger jumped up mid-sentence, surprised to suffer such a crude interruption.

“I don’t have time for your nonsense,” Reyes clarified. His brows scrunched together in suppressed rage. “I-... No, _we_ don’t need your money.”

The stranger opened his mouth and shifted forward as if to protest the sudden derailment of his plans. But he leveled eyes with Reyes, whose own unimpressed and suddenly crestfallen demeanor showed just how badly he lost the gambit. The older man shrugged as if to pat himself on the back before slowly rising from his stool and leaving a bill for the drink. 

“You know,” he said as he pushed the stool back and rose to his feet. “Your father wasn’t a bad man – a brilliant man, in fact. He just happened to be on the wrong end of things.” He turned around, letting his back face the passive bartender. The suitcase next to him made a loud click as he raised it by the handle. “Alec Ryder was... _is_ a brilliant man too,” he said casually. He didn’t even stop to turn. It didn’t matter at that point. By the time he dropped the name, Reyes’s eyes had immediately fallen on the sleek business card left shining on the bar counter.

“If I played my cards right,” the man continued, “he’ll be on the wrong end of things too.”


	2. A Safe House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reyes says goodbye to his mother.

When Reyes was five years old, his father scolded him for sitting with his back to the door.

“No son of mine sits there,” he said gruffly before propelling himself off the seat. The legs of the dining chair made an unpleasant scraping noise against the lacquered hardwood floorboards as Carlos Vidal pushed it back. His mother, sitting across on the other end of the table, merely toyed with the grilled sirloin steak with the prongs of her silver fork. Reyes did nothing but sit glumly, his thumbs twiddling together from underneath the table. The two kept to themselves as Carlos marched over to Reyes, whose seat was positioned inauspiciously.

“Get up,” he barked. In those years Carlos easily towered over Reyes like a giant. His hand was as herculean as a bear’s, and Reyes didn’t like the way he seemed to impose an iron grip on everything he touched.

At five, Reyes learned two hard lessons. First and foremost, nowhere is safe – not even your home. Anyone could break through the doors, plow through your security, and murder you in cold blood, and something as simple as sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time could expedite things against your favor. Second and perhaps no less important, protecting the people you love sometimes meant having to be cruel to them. Carlos was not a very doting or loving father in any superficial way. But little things like teaching him seemingly stringent safety precautions were the only ways Reyes knew just how much his father loved him.

It was a fact his mother never let him forget, and she was steadfast in this self-appointed duty even years later when – at the ripe age of twenty-one – Reyes had come home as a certified Alliance Navy Pilot.

He leaned against the brick wall and took a drag from his cigarette. The balcony seemed smaller than when he had last seen it, but the alleys were no less crude and obscene. A makeshift gallery of sorts, graffiti splashed colors in otherwise dark corridors. Every foot or so some iteration of ambiguously alien genitals graced the walls in neon paint, bright enough that an unwitting resident could see it three stories up. Reyes merely shook his head, waiting for the kettle sitting inside the kitchen on stovetop to whistle itself ready for tea. Somewhere he could hear the brisk punch of a hapless thug making short work of a rich drunk. A gentle breeze lulled whatever worries the imagery induced in Reyes, who was quite content relishing the soothing coolness of menthols as the smoke blistered his throat. He was quite sure that the stolen credits would not be the end of this fictive victim, just as there would never be an end to the howling of guns as bullets hailed far into the night.

“You’ll catch a cold,” he heard her say from inside. A crown full of silver hair peered through the open window. She looked up at him with an intent smile. “The tea is almost ready.”

Teresa Vidal was a feeble old woman now.

Strange.

The year would have seen her turn fifty-one years old. She wasn’t even halfway through the average life expectancy age. But the slight, almost unnoticeable hunch of her back added to her years, and Reyes’s absence certainly didn’t help. He listened around for the way she scuttled about the kitchen, thinking on the joints and aches she never complained about. Certainly Cerberus’s little... “stipend” didn’t hurt, but it didn’t seem to help any. She hadn’t spent any of the money, or at least not in any real, ostensible way. She never bothered to look past the hovel they’ve resided in since he was a child. Even the peeling wallpaper, yellowed with the years and smoke of exhaust and tar, seemed to atrophy with the rest of the place.

“Let me finish this!” he said with playful insolence, garbling through his words as the cigarette sat perched in his mouth. He took a sharper drag, almost sucking in the air around him, and the tobacco burned brighter.

Teresa clicked her tongue. The sharp laughing lines on her jowls drooped to a more pronounced grimace. “You know I don’t like that habit.”

_Habit_ was a euphemism, but his mother spoke it with disgust through the grit of her teeth. She busied herself with an apron whilst shaking her head in a long, drawn-out performance of her disappointment (to which Reyes rolled his eyes in the sort of appreciative annoyance unique to young sons with overbearing mothers).

“Your father had that habit too,” she continued. Her fingers fumbled for the dial on the stove, lowering the heat until the flame beneath the screeching whistle of the kettle flickered away.

Reyes tried to avoid the subject altogether. He continued leaning against the wall out on the fire escape “balcony.” He breathed out as if with an exasperated sigh before barking back at her with a smirk. “It’s a stress reliever,” he yelled into the window.

“What could you possibly be stressed about?!” The clang of teacups and a pot alerted him to her impatience.

Her retort prompted a slight chuckle from him. “Many things,” he continued in his raised voice. Reyes breathed in the last of his cigarette before crushing it beneath the sole of his boot. The cinders burned against the scraping paint of the fire escape before the airless pressure of his shoe doused its embers. “I’m a _busy_ man.”

The jocularity of his tone was supposed to end conversation, not prolong it. But his mother wasn’t having it. 

“Yeah, you’re _all_ busy I’m sure.”

Reyes stuck his head in from outside, raising the window with both his arms before crouching lower to re-enter the apartment. By now she already had two filled teacups on the small table adjacent to the wall, and the kettle had long ago simmered down to a steaming silence. Teresa contented herself on the chair opposite from him, relishing in the warmth she held in her hands. He took his place across from her, settling with elbows on the edge of the table. 

For the first time he noticed her rheumy eyes, the way they her pupils settled as if floating on the surface of dark, abyssal pools. They were eyes, Reyes thought, which saw many things. True, she was spared the bad episode of her husband’s murder. Still, the long days spent on streets peddling for scraps had its own sort of pain. It showed in the trembling of her hands and the arthritic groans of her knees. Reyes wasn’t a particularly huge fan of tea, but the time he spent drinking it with his mother was a palliative that she relished. It was the least he owed her.

“Your father would be proud,” she said suddenly.

Reyes stayed still with the tea untouched before him. It still swirled like a strangely calm and serene whirlpool. Small leaves floated on its surface, its color somewhat reddish from how long they steeped.

“He had so many plans for you.” Teresa paused to sip more of her tea. “‘Tesa,’ he would say. ‘My son will have a different life.’” Her eyes wandered from her beverage to her son, whose own taciturn expressionlessness hid a bit of his own forgetfulness regarding the matter. “‘A _better_ one,’ he said.” She leaned back and sighed wistfully, as if the mere recollection of her late husband’s words was enough to ease the pain of aching bones. “He wanted a life where you didn’t have to fight, to steal...” There was a lingering silence as she sifted her mind for the proper words and the proper sentiment lining the arbitrary bout of nostalgia that had seized her, “to _lie_...”

A sort of pensiveness stole the mood, and before Reyes could even react, Teresa added to her anecdote. “Your father had his secrets,” she said with a somewhat somber smile. “I believe he hated having them most.”

He snickered reflexively. It was the only tell he would give, save the impulse he had to shift ever so slightly on his seat. “To better lives,” Reyes said as he raised his teacup as if in a toast.

To that Teresa grinned from ear to ear. “To my son,” she said quietly, “the first Alliance pilot in the family.” If she could smile wider, Reyes was sure she would. Instead she settled for the sort of inward bob of her head, containing her glee with the tightness of her grip around the cup. Beneath the table, he could hear her feet shuffle closer together.

What a strange thing to celebrate, he thought. Surely there were prouder achievements in the family. Although his father’s memory bore some pain for them, becoming senator was ... a pretty _big_ deal. Still, his mother couldn’t hide her pride, and he wasn’t about to deflate her mirth with an uncharacteristic drive to be humble about his own milestones.

“You know,” she resumed in a low, droning tone. “He had dreams too, your father did.”

Reyes sipped his tea loudly. The water was still hot and burned the inside of his cheek. Yet he maintained an aloof attentiveness, his eyes hovering above the rim of his cup so as to humor the ramblings of a sentimental old woman.

“But they... changed... when you were born,” she smiled, her big black eyes gleaming brightly.

“What were they?” The ceramic thudded loudly on the table as he lowered it.

“His dreams?” Her ears perked up in surprise, as if he came in out of nowhere and the words she herself spoke were some fleeting fantasy.

“Yes.” Reyes wasn’t quite sure what they were playing at; why it was worth visiting the dead and contemplating the things they never said. But it seemed to fill time for his mother – whose own graying days often prompted reveries over hot tea at the tail end of day. 

Another sigh flitted from the drooping frown of her mouth. She too set her tea down, but more gently than her son did, before placing both hands flat on her knees. Bobbing her head to the side, she stared out into empty space and let her gaze hover out beyond the small window of their kitchen. The sheer curtains blew inward with the breeze, and for a while the vermillion color of dusk in Omega brightened to a paler sheen within the room.

“He wanted to be someone,” she said.

_To be someone?_ Reyes opened his mouth as if to press her further.

But the taut pull of her frown showed just how cryptic it was to her. She shrugged, as if she had long ago stopped pretending she had any hint or clue to a proper interpretation. “He _was_ someone to me. He is _still_ someone to me.” Her eyes looked to him with something of a plea, brows straightened by the weight of the words she was conveying to him. “Just as you are, Reyes.” Her hand drifted over his, squeezing the palm of his hand with her cold, wrinkled fingers. “You are someone now.” Just as she said those words, warmth radiated from her hand. “A good man with a better life.”

 

* * *

 

She died five years later.

A kindly mortician handed him a ceramic jar when he had arrived that morning. “We found her alone in her apartment. The neighbors reported a smell.” 

Reyes clutched the urn. It felt cold in his ungloved hands. Uninviting even. 

He sat in the apartment, wondering how long he could stay there and whether it was worth holding on to the last remnants of his past life. 

It was fortuitous, actually. He came to visit unannounced, ready to declare his life in the Milky Way Galaxy over. Unfortunately, his mother had beaten him to it. Sitting lonesome on the very chair where he last spoke to her, he looked at the empty space before him and wondered how many sunsets and sunrises she spent sipping tea by herself, thinking of Reyes as he lived a supposedly better life. 

He even prepared a speech, in case she didn’t take the news of his departure kindly. _I’m leaving_ , it began. _I was offered something, and I couldn’t refuse_.

Somehow the cryptic nature of it became ever more opaque – unnecessary and histrionic given the simplicity of her life. The small and rather poor excuse for a dining table still stood against the table. One of its legs or the very foundations of the apartment itself (Reyes wasn’t sure) bent to an inconspicuous crookedness, because it hobbled whenever an unwitting arm or a teacup rested on its surface. To say such abstract things in grandiose secrecy seemed quaint. The very dramatic exit to Andromeda itself seemed very quaint.

It was all so pointless now. The world was short one good mother.

Reyes sat glum with urn sitting neatly before him. The table hobbled towards him, bending to the weight of both his elbows and his mother’s remains. The rest of his speech played back in his brain and steeled his focus. Fingers drumming against the circumference of the glazed clay, the words fell into something of a rhythm.

_There’s no turning back from it_. His own voice echoed eerily, as if in recollection of a memory, in his ears. He could almost see his mother sit plaintively before him, bearing all the weight of the details in his solemn news. _I am to go to Andromeda and have a new start there_.

“New start” was also a euphemism. Just like “habit” and other harmless words that shielded many ears from the sordid reality beneath them. 

_This was what my training was for. I am to go and be a pilot there._

He swallowed a knot in his throat. The fluorescent light above him flickered. She wasn’t even there, and he wasn’t even speaking. Yet he was nervous. It was obvious with the way his fingers drummed relentlessly on the base of the urn. 

_I am going to right some wrongs, Mamá._

A fictive scene played out his head. His mother would hear those words – the carried over thoughts of revenge – and bowed her head as if in solemn prayer. She wouldn’t stop him, but she would shed a tear, because she had just lost a son. Though Reyes knew all along that she had lost her son a long time ago. She lost him when he was seven years old on the same day she lost her husband. And she was waiting quietly to herself for a boy who would never return.

 

* * *

 

TO: [REDACTED]

FROM: HEAD OF OPERATIONS – CERBERUS

SUBJECT: ANDROMEDA INITIATIVE, PROJECT X

AGENT [REDACTED] CALL SIGN ANUBIS WILL BE STATIONED ABOARD VESSEL HYPERION, THE PURPORTED HUMAN ARK OF THE PROJECT. HIS MISSION IS TO RETRIEVE A PROTOTYPE [REDACTED] ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, NICKNAMED [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] WILL BE ESSENTIAL FOR OUR OVERARCHING GOAL IN MANIPULATING [REDACTED] AS WEAPONS AND TOOLS AGAINST [REDACTED], WHICH COMMANDER [REDACTED] HAS DEEMED AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT.

THIS MISSION IS STANDARD RECONNAISSANCE AND RETRIEVAL. AGENT [REDACTED] IS REQUIRED TO COMPLY WITH HUMAN ARK PATHFINDER, FORMER N7 [REDACTED] AND HIS TEAM UNTIL HE CAN SAFELY RETRIEVE [REDACTED] ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 

SECRECY AND DISCRETION IS OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE. NEXUS LEADERSHIP MUST NOT KNOW OF AGENT [REDACTED]’S EXISTENCE OR OF THE NATURE OF THIS MISSION. SHOULD AGENT [REDACTED] BE COMPROMISED, HE WILL BE NEUTRALIZED.


	3. "Keep your friends close..."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reyes boards the Ark Hyperion.

Reyes spent his last night in the Milky Way reviewing files. With his back hunched over a desk, he took refuge in a small antique lamp with a canvas shade and a narrow neck. Though humble, it offered dim lighting for an otherwise... _riveting_ read. As his eyes pored over the glowing text of the data pad, his mind aimlessly wandered to the other possibilities he shirked. The soft, sprawling arms of a lover, a night full of heady drink, or even money well spent on _good_ takeout (a luxury in Omega). He almost sighed at the thought.

But then, not without a resentfully grateful roll of his eyes, he remembered just how lazy he was. It would prove too taxing to explain why he would leave the soon-to-be ex’s warm bed (and it _would_ be a pain to explain that it was a union of convenience – one to while away evenings up until his departure); it wouldn’t do to go into cryo with a hangover; and, lastly, nothing was stopping him from _still_ ordering takeout. A muted chuckle was all he needed, and soon his fingers dashed across the interface of his omnitool, ordering a greasy helping of good food to pass the night.

Until then, there were files. Alec Ryder’s, to be precise, and the pathfinder team he would have to infiltrate.

Cerberus delivered on otherwise preciously hidden information. Reyes could recall when his contact handed him the drive containing the dossier.

 _“This should help you on your mission,”_ he had said. They met at a bar that time. It was impossible to tell if he was the same agent who recruited him years before, or if he was some other nondescript ageless fellow with a penchant for his tobacco. Either way, the soft glow of smokes was all that lit the profile of his face, and even then Reyes could hardly get a good look. An antiquated hat stiffened by the rim and lined with some fabric in the body cast a sizeable shadow over his face. He seemed to lower it and raise it in dramatic points of the conversation, as if to help the poor fledgling double agent learn his cues better.

 _“This is...”_ Reyes found himself stammering. 

 _“Something to help you in your mission,”_ the contact cut in with repeated emphasis _. “You won’t be alone.”_

He was briefed long ago. An ambiguously large contingent would be coming with him to Andromeda, he knew. Precisely where and how they would stay in contact was apparently too “sensitive” for someone of his ranking. Nevertheless, they were generous with their information, and seeing as how he was about to play wolf in sheep’s clothing, he had to learn a lot quicker than most.

 _“You know Mr. Vidal,”_ the agent began as he put his glass to his mouth. _“We always had faith in you.”_

Reyes remembered focusing on the way the contact’s hand trembled imperceptibly with each raise of his glass. _“Who’s we?”_ he asked. He hadn’t realized the soured frown which overtook his signature cavalier smile until the nameless man before him laughed

 _“Good question.”_ He took another drag of his cigarette before nodding to the drive he just handed to the rookie. _“That’s something you will have to hold on to once we’re across.”_

Again he took note of the subtle placements of the now inclusive pronoun. Reyes tapped light fingers on the oak surface of the bar, counting seconds in his head with metronomic precision.

 _“Read it carefully,”_ he said in a deft change of topic. A nod of his head had pointed to the dossier safe in Reyes’s gloved hand. _“The metaphor for these missions is usually wolf among sheep,”_ he raised his head high, looking up to the bluish limelight as he exhaled trail slithers of smoke.

Reyes’s breaths quickened at the mention, alarmed by the too coincidental observation he had made. 

 _“But the fact of the matter is...”_ the agent paused, letting a truculent gaze fix on the small chip. _“You’re entering a lion’s den.”_

Days later, sitting in the comforts of a seedy hotel room, he began a procrastinated perusal. The foreboding wasn’t lost on him, but it was hard to take the contact seriously.

Thumbing through page after page, there was an eerie and hermetically sealed neatness to Alec Ryder’s life. For instance, Reyes learned that Ryder had long ago been _dis_ honorably discharged from military service. His wife had passed in the interim years of said discharge and the launch of the Andromeda Initiative, and in the mean time it was his two children (twins, Reyes noted not without some piqued bemusement) who carried on his legacy.

Interspersed in this brief biography were candid photographs to help visualize the picaresque scene. The first was a standard military mug-shot-esque portrait. Cropped hair, with only a shadow trailing his chin to speak of a beard, and relatively seamless lines over his eyes. Ryder was undoubtedly a young and fearless man at the time the picture was taken. A churlish half-grimace marked the taut clenching of his jaws. The soft features of his rather short, plump nose were marked by the hardness of his jowls and the height of his gaunt cheekbones. During training, his supervisor would note that such details in a photo held a proverbial thousand words. _Was he nervous when the photo was taken? Is he squeamish about recording his likeness? Having it reflected? Or is he simply a dim-witted man whose soulless eyes and hardlined brows knew of no other sentiment save duty?_ The instructor’s voice went on and on, giving page after page of psychoanalysis to be inferred from the deceptively trite details of a photo.

It was dated before the First Contact War. Reyes nodded his head as he read the small captioned dates couched in between the photos. Strange, Reyes thought, that he already wore such a murderous look even _before_ he bore the grisly testimony of war.

His thumb flipped through, and soon the page entered into a different realm altogether.

What should’ve been a record of his medals of honor, his acts of valor, or even candid moments of boyishness with the other soldiers of his regiment were instead replaced with a more ...different version of his life. The next photo showed a woman sitting along a sanded bench as she looked out to an ocean. The waves before her were frozen to a mid-crash, waiting to throw their weight on sands that would never feel their wrath. She wore her hair in an up-done braid; a white flower with drooping petals that crowned her temples. She had brown skin and a pensive air about her. It took Reyes a second more of scrutiny, but he soon noticed the slight bump on her stomach protruding over the red, high-waisted hemline of her dress. A silk, shoulder-stiffened blouse almost covered it up. Below the photo was a terse caption: “Boracay, Philippines (February 2163).”

Reyes hemmed something of a breath, neither all that interested nor bored by his own obtrusions into the life of his father’s murderer. It seemed unforgivably quaint for such a sentimental photo to be buried in the dossier, like some remains of the mythic “American dream” bespoken from centuries past. His breathing seemed to deepen; his grip on his datapad tightening at the thought that such a man could live in contented peace, with a wife who was no more beautiful and perhaps not much kinder than his own mother; with children who would have all the luxuries robbed of him.

Next on the screen flared an idyllic, family portrait. Alec Ryder was dressed in military blues, that somewhat formal ceremonial garb so customary to soldiers who didn’t know how to be anything else. Next to him, the same young woman but this time with cropped, straightened hair and an understated white dress. Where Mr. Ryder was frowning in an attempt at deadpan solemnity, _Mrs._ Ryder was smiling brightly, lips reaching ear to ear – the familiar smile of mothers. She held two infants wrapped in some grayish blanket, their faces still obscured and blurred as they rested in their mother’s strong arms.

Another swipe of his finger, and a more recent photo came. A boy and a girl. They were crouched over a flower. The girl had a magnifying glass in tow, and the boy held onto a small toolbox. They both had warm black hair, tawny skin, and the unmistakably low, thickset brows of their father. The sister had a rounder face with big round black eyes shimmering against the flash of the camera, whereas her brother had a lankier skeleton figure. They must have been no more than ten, if he had to guess (truth be told, Reyes hadn’t seen much of children to make a better wager). He noticed the flower was one of many among a bush. A light pinkish ombre traced over its half blossomed petals, and on its leaf dangled a lime green cocoon. The girl eagerly pointed at it, showing the same ear-to-ear grin he recognized from her mother in the family photo. 

With a sigh, Reyes set the datapad down. His fingers pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing firmly between his eyes to coax out an encroaching headache. Somehow, the prospect of watching this family go through happier memories left a bitter taste in his mouth. A dryness, wrapped in that cottonmouth feel, left a piercing sensation at his throat. Without skipping a beat, Reyes pushed back the rolling chair before marching off to his kitchenette. The streaming of tap water pouring pressurized, milky white water into his glass seemed to soothe a bit of the migraine.

 _You’re selfish_ , he recalled an accusatory ex saying. Just a year ago, he had been pouring himself a glass of water in that same spot, in that same ungodly hour, when an unhappy lover aired out what dirty laundry they had.

 _I’m not selfish_ , he wanted to argue back. But he didn’t.

Reyes wondered if Alec Ryder ever suffered such accusations from his family; if that happy pregnant wife of his was always smiling back as she relished the summer breeze born of tropical waters; and did his children call him selfish too? Or did they know him by the advertised merits of his so-called service as some gallant and retired hero? He puzzled over what secrets must have festered among the Ryders, and whether it was she (and not him) who stayed up sleepless, wondering what violence he participated in. But something throbbing in Reyes’s temples drummed out such pointless contemplations. In all likelihood, Reyes thought, his wife died happy with her husband, unknowing if not uncaring of what enemies he made in their time together.

Ryder had his happy family; Reyes was left with nothing but the skeleton of hopes simmering beneath migraines, the toothy grin of a dead mother, and his faint remembrance of his father’s remains landing on his foot. A gnawing restlessness tugged at his chest, and the familiar coiling of his stomach left him frozen on the floor. The sound of water dripping from the sink rang hollow against the tiled walls. It would take several more minutes before he would regain control of himself, breathe back a sigh of relief, and rest back on his chair to welcome in sweet sleep.

The datapad would remain untouched on his desk for the rest of the evening. It wouldn’t even follow him across the Citadel, past the docks, and onto the rendezvous point for the future members of Ark Hyperion. It would collect dust, as the photographs would have if they had been made of film and materialized beyond its digitized existence in the microchip dossier. 

Reyes left all evidence of whatever life Ryder might have had on that desk, content to let it wither into obscurity lest he wavered in his conviction.

 _Too late for that_ , he thought as he gulped down the tepid sink water. _Too late for that.._.

 

* * *

 

“Reyes Vidal?”

The cryogenic technician was a mousy man. His face was half buried in his glasses, and it seemed all the hustle and bustle of people trying to get into their places made him recede further inward.

Reyes stepped forward with a nod. “Present,” he said in smiling, sardonic fashion. He had been waiting near three hours.

The technician readied his omnitool. An orange array of holographic text and codes lit up the squeamish pallor of his face, and soon an entire team of people in lab coats surrounded him. He had boarded the Hyperion just hours earlier, but he was immediately shepherded with several other nameless faces into a cryo lab, waiting in line like excited, anxious cattle.

“Look here,” an Asari doctor said as she appeared seemingly from the shadows.

Reyes’s pupils followed her pen as she waved it far to his right, and again as she flung it opposite to his left.

“Good,” she said, not without some cool urgency ringing in her voice. Another doctor (or perhaps a technician? a nurse?) prodded him with their stethoscope; another surreptitiously wrapped a blood pressure monitor around his arm. An array of small and simple tests made him feel poked and slightly invaded, but he had been prepared for it well enough that he bore it stoically with nothing but crooked smile to hint at his annoyance. At least these last minute things weren’t as bad as, say, the “psych evals” he had passed with flying colors just a month before.

“Did I pass?” he asked, making plain the irascible glower in his eyes as he brandished a lopsided grin.

She eyed him with a momentary glance, more curious than annoyed. “Pathfinder team?” she read aloud with an incredulous tone from the file on her interface. A stubborn roll of laughter rumbled from her throat, which she tried to hide with a gritty cough. She then fiddled with her omnitool.

Reyes wanted to ask her what was so funny, but she turned her attention away to the cryogenic technician just as he opened his mouth. “He’s ready,” she said before marching off to the next patient. She walked several paces down a different platform before she stopped in front of a woman with gaudy blue – or was it purple? - hair. It was striking amidst a crowd of humans just how much of an eyesore the unnatural radiance of the shade had beneath the sallow, brightly burning LED bulbs. He thought with an amused bob of his head, fingers pinching at his chin, that the piquant color didn’t match the Asari’s own complexion. “Who’s that?” he asked aloud, to no one in particular.

The mousy cryo technician jumped up startled, as if the mere unaccounted-for voice of his patient was its own thunderous panic in need of quelling. “Uh... uh....” He pointed at his glasses, moving them up over the bridge of his nose. “That’s Ms. Ryder... _Sarianna_ Ryder.” There was an added yet nevertheless abrupt weight dropped off just at the sound of her name in his pronunciation of it. He retreated into the shell of his lab coat, shoulders seemingly engulfing his now disappearing neck. “She’s in the same team as you, s-sir.”

A small wick – a mere brush of glowing embers – lit in Reyes’s eyes. Said-Pathfinder’s daughter remained with her back facing them, chatting with the doctor in blissful ignorance of her watchful audience. He tried to listen, to gain what he could in the supposed lion’s den now that he found one of them, but all around him a stampede of voices fought for air in the high, vaulted ceilings. Voices didn’t get very far, and he really had nothing to work from beyond the taut smile on the doctor’s face and the lackadaisical slackening of “ _Sarianna”_ Ryder’s two shoulders.

If the child was there then the parent couldn’t have been too far. And... _where’s the twin_? Reyes’s eyes dashed from one corner to the other, craning his neck so as to scan the room, cluttered as it was with tech and people. _Ugh_ , he groaned with a reflexive grinding of his teeth. _There’s always too many people..._

“S-ssir are you ready?” the technician stammered out the question before hurriedly racing to the finish.

Reyes shrugged before traipsing off to the designated platform. The hiss of machines as their mechanical, rigid limbs pressed through hydraulics lowered a cryopod before him. The vessel itself clasped to the ground before steam poured through its crevices as the door glided open. An orange line swam through the glass surface, buzzing after the circuitry made the whole thing light up in serene, neon blue.

“I guess I have to be.”

Perhaps the technician would’ve appreciated his wit if it hadn’t been delayed by Reyes’s own dumbstruck awe. His pupils constricted half in anxiety-ridden fear of its smallness; its rigidly square skeleton of a hovel dark and foreboding. He was told he would be asleep for more than six hundred years, and yet the prospect of passing through it all trapped in a box was a reality that never set in. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and the stunned and audible gulp in his throat betrayed his wariness to the other man.

“I-if you would please step in, s-sir.” The technician stretched out his hand in a guiding gesture towards the pod. Though the stammering continued on, he exchanged his nerve-wracked expression for a more placid bewilderment in the face of Reyes’s wild-eyed fear.

Behind them, an irate elsewise nondescript member of the Hyperion in their white and blue accented jumpsuit tapped their foot audibly. “We don’t have all day,” muttered the faceless man under his breath.

Reyes shot a menacing glare over his shoulder, but the surly man merely parried with an aversion of his eyes, leaving nothing save an audibly exasperated sigh to trail after his simpering impatience. _You have six hundred years, actually_.

He swung one leg over the pod before hoisting himself over the door and lowering himself onto the compartment.

“Now breathe sir.” The mousy man’s words tapered off as the glass door slid back in. Another jet of steam poured through, fogging up the surface just as it closed over his head in a series of clicks. A few other silhouettes hovered above him, he could see, but the condensation blurred all sight, and the figures merely looked like blobs melding together as the chill set in over the hairs of his skin.

A muffled sound fought against the perforated seals of his pod.

“W-we’ll see you on the other side, s-sir.”

The blobs of shadows and silhouettes dispersed, and the glass seemed to ice a silver sheen above him. Within the pod a blue light flashed in a burst into an all-white wash before it receded into a haze of pitch darkness. Reyes’s ears thrummed as it struggled to keep up pace with the staggered heaving of his lungs.

His heart kept the beat going. The rhythm steadfast, and yet his ears just couldn’t keep up. It seemed to trudge through the seconds as his vision, then his smell, and then even the frostbitten touch of his fingers waded somewhere – aimless and distant.

_I’m going to right some wrongs, mamá._

_Your father wasn’t a bad man..._

_You won’t be alone_.

The last thing he could remember was his breath dispersed, as if torn and stretched and spread until it streamed against his face.

And then there was nothing.


	4. "...and your enemies closer" Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reyes joins the Pathfinder team

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 was going to be longer, but I decided to split it into half. The rest of the content will be chapter 5. A lot of introductory material is now coming your way!
> 
> Note: I used 95% in-game dialogue for the bridge scene.

Reyes was told earlier in his training that cryogenic stasis was impossible for human beings. Or at least, it was impossible to keep them _alive_ naturally when subjected to such deathly low temperatures. So a solution involved innovative interventions. Formulas, numbers, and names that were incomprehensible to him made themselves known. Each formed the part and parcel that kept him alive.

He felt a congealed and fluid pressure in his bones the moment he woke to the gentle hum of voices bouncing around a silent cryo chamber.

“Top of the morning!” The greeting came out in glaringly cheerful tones, as deafening and loud to Reyes’s newly awakened ears as the blaring of alarm sirens. “That is, if it _is_ morning,” a man in a doctor’s uniform said before boorishly laughing at his own joke.

“Where-...” he spat out. Trapped in a sea of wires, he could hear the shuffle of quick footsteps amidst the muted ringing in his ears. A cool shade of blue tinted his clouded vision, and all he could do was give his shoulders a brisk shake to remedy the sensory overload seizing his struggling lungs.

“His vital signs are good,” spoke another. Though the voice rang close to him, his blurred vision seemed to put a distance between them. Far and yet so ingratiatingly close.

It took Reyes a full second to the feel weight of his torso and the soreness radiating from his spine. An unfeeling hand combs through his hair, tousling and frazzling it as his eyes blinked and unblinked in a panic. A heaviness made his limbs tingle with a thousand pricks and needles, the soft hairs on his skin magnetized by everything and anything around him. He felt more hands grip him by the elbow and push him forward, getting him to sit upright before slowly lifting onto his feet.

Soon enough, the whitewash of light that blinded him receded. Faint outlines and shadows formed from a palette of steely gray and blue returned to his sight. The chamber had the same cavernous emptiness filled by the hustle and bustle of the med staff on board. The panic of it all was enough to let doubt creep into his hazy mind. “We made it… Andromeda?” Though his mouth moved with familiar fluidity, his jaw however hinged with pain from the nuts and bolts of pressure. Tongue-tied and languorous, words stumbled out in a scurrilous hurry.

“Yup we sure did!”

Reyes would have given a groan and a menacing side-eye if he was indeed at the “top” of his proverbial morning, but his entire body and face felt like an amorphous gooey mass waiting to melt.

“Stasis sickness eh?” The perky technician (or nurse… or staff… Reyes didn’t care) lifted Reyes’s arm over his shoulder before gently guiding him to an examination bed. Other staff busied themselves performing the same obtrusive tests and checkups. A familiar stethoscope and the remembered tedium of a puffed up blood pressure monitor wrapped around him. Reyes _really_ wondered if they had made it. Soon enough the buzz of people left him well enough alone, immediately abandoning him for the next brave soul ready to face the lag of centuries bundled up in a frozen dream. “The doctor will come get you soon. Until then, relax a bit, ‘kay buddy?”

_I’m not your-..._ Reyes sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose before planting both his elbows above his knees. Getting used to migraines because the whole world was a massive headache was one thing. Painkillers or alcohol usually did the trick, but now his head throbbed as if the malady came to collect. Six hundred years of migraines took their raincheck, and all Reyes could do was close his eyes and listen to the steadfast beeping of a monitor. Familiar and somewhat calming.

 

* * *

 

Reyes had been staring at the projected stills of utopian golden worlds. Lush and vibrant flora drooped over serene and waveless waters shortly before it quickly dissolved into a black screen. A gradient pixelation of light soon replaced it, and then he found himself admiring the dauntingly beautiful void of space. A sea of black contrasted with a sliver of pale light shining against floating celestial bodies - frozen for the frame but no doubt circling their elliptical journeys around brightly burning stars.

He stood before the endless cycling of stills not without a hint of amusement. He would call it cheesy, even be so brazen as to laugh in all their faces in jest of how _duped_ everyone else was about the whole thing, but who was the bigger fool _then_ ? The hopeless sheep bleating about even _more_ immaterial signs for this ever-elusive hope, or Reyes himself for jumping aboard a one-way trip lightyears away all in the name of revenge? The gritting of his teeth reminded him how he rationalized it as a new beginning for himself at the time too, and it wasn’t like Cerberus abandoned him. The plan was _so_ much more, or at least that was what he had to tell himself.  

Nevertheless, he let out a sigh and reasoned that any break from their mantra of utopian restarts  would mean dispelling his own performed hopes of “a better beginning.” The last thing he wanted was a compromised mission, after all…

“Reyes Vidal?” It was the asari doctor again. She threw a datapad off to the bench next to him before punching a scan that lit up his upper torso in a mist of orange light. “Dr. T’Perro,” she said by way of  what Reyes considered a half-assed and long overdue introduction.

“Pleasure,” he said in a cautiously pleasant tone as he crossed his arms over his chest. He waited for Dr. T’Perro to finish with her scan before putting his most charming foot forward and offering a smile. “I’m guessing we’re here,” he remarked, but he realized within a moment the ambiguity in such small talk. “The Nexus,” he added. “We rendezvoused with the flagship?”

For a moment her eyes, which had been glued to the interface screen of her omnitool, looked askance to her side. Even her fingers hovered over the air, ceasing their rhythmic typing and punching in of whatever the hell she considered so important regarding the metrics of _his_ wellbeing. “Not exactly,” she said, as if finally deciding what the best answer was.

Reyes raised a brow, unconvinced by her trepid answer. “Not exactly? What? Did we meet with part of it? Or did someone fall asleep behind the wheel and miss the exit?”

Apt as the metaphor was, it was archaic and - based on the unamused point of her brow - inappropriately irreverent. “The Pathfinder wants you mission ready.” The terse end of it signalled to Reyes that perhaps _he_ wasn’t the only one who woke up grumpy from their protracted nap in cryo. “Either way,” she continued quite unexpectedly. As soon as she was done fussing with her omnitool, the orange light disappeared, and the dim blue tint of medbay filled the room once more. “Squad two lost one of its members, there was an impact…”

_An impact?_ Reyes stayed silent so as to hear the rest. It didn’t bode well for the Initiative (much less for him) to already have suffered such setbacks. “So they woke me up to replace them, right? How did it happen?”

Dr. T’Perro motioned for him to follow, and soon they both traversed the bay amidst a crowd of staff and doctors hurrying to other stasis pods in need of attention. “The Hyperion hit against some… some _thing_ , and it hit parts of the reactors and gravitational fields. We had to do a reset, but it damaged Scott Ryder’s pod in the process.”

The double doors before them slid open in a soundless flurry. Brighter lights awashed the massive corridor, and soon the two were headed to an unoccupied shuttle.

_Already_? He raised a brow in disbelief. He had literally woken up less than an hour earlier, and already the lions were picking themselves out. “Sorry for the loss,” he said in a more mirthful tone than he intended. Reyes gave his shoulders a bit of a shake, attributing the incidental sarcasm to stasis sickness.

“He’s not lost. Just comatose,” The doctor immediately corrected. She kept apace in front of him, unfazed by his comment. “Sarianna Ryder is your squad leader now. You’re in capable hands.” The doctor stood to the side as Reyes hobbled over to the shuttle. She crossed her hands behind her in a staunch and rather formal sendoff, smiling politely all the while.

The doors closed, and Reyes let the name ring in his head for a minute. A flash of a head with a mop of purplish blue hair jogged his memory a little. That, and a wide grin stretching from ear to ear. A small girl with a round face. _It was a shame_ , he thought not without restrained delight, what _happened to the twin brother.._.

As the shuttle trembled with a start before seamlessly zooming along the rails in a dark and sporadically lit tunnel, Reyes wondered whether this unexpected change of plans would make things easier in terms of infiltrating the team, playing them against one another, and getting scans where he could. He knew next to nothing about his new squad leader... _and_ Alec Ryder for that matter.

_You’re entering a lion’s den_. The words of his superior echoed harshly in his mind, making him regret the stab of doubt and fear that had made him _foolishly_ leave the dossier behind.

In the spare minutes afforded him aboard the shuttle, Reyes mulled over the steps the frantic situation set before him. The contact was clear regarding the matter: he would be briefed once they were across.

But when? How? They were keeping track of him _somehow_. Reyes patted down his pants and his sides with nervous hands, as if a tracker would miraculously reveal itself from that mere act of paranoia. It looked silly, come to think of it, but who was to say so, lost as he was in the zooming array of lights cast over an endlessly black tunnel? Next to him, the panel showed their progress, and the light was ready to blink a cool emerald green as the Bridge neared.

The shuttle halted to a seamless stop. Neither friction nor inertia left Reyes swaying with the change of pace before the doors parted open before him and the familiar pallor of a main corridor washed him with light. He trotted down a short flight of steps before briskly traipsing towards the entrance.

“Reyes Vidal?” a woman asked. The rather unique side cut overlaid with side swept and ombred blonde hair alerted him to her identity.

_Lieutenant Cora Harper._ Though they never met formally, it was protocol for the grunts and lower ranking members of the team to be briefed on their superiors. A soldier worth his salt already perused and regurgitated what factoids and quirks surrounded the human Pathfinder. The rest, Reyes knew, didn’t really bother with the second-in-command, but he gave it enough time at least prior to their big departure. _A lion’s den,_ the words echoed in his head in foretelling fashion. He’d be remiss not to heed them.

He nodded as if in salute, to which she just gave a polite smile (not unlike that of the good Dr. T’Perro). The formalized expression on her face betrayed precisely the tension that seemed to seep into the tight-lipped cheeriness surrounding the Hyperion.

“About time you got here,” she said curtly. Cora bobbed her head to the side and gestured for him to follow.

“I like to be fashionably late,” he said with thrown up hands. The cavalier remark fell either on deaf or indifferent ears. Regardless, Reyes trailed dutifully after the lieutenant.

The two entered the bridge amid a frantic jostling of panicked crewmembers. Reyes had to step back as one hapless crewmate dashed clumsily in front of them onto another part of the deck. The buzz was almost enough to distract Reyes from the view, but no one could ignore the sudden darkness which had enveloped them when - before the domed viewing pane - Alec Ryder and the ark’s Captain Dunn stood in silhouette against charcoal-colored, spiral tendrils. It was an arm that would have blocked out their entire view had the ship not swayed away from it.

Reyes bit his tongue before he could voice his own panic, holding back an instinct to question. The shadow it cast in the room was alarming enough, but, as far as he was concerned, this was _not_ part of the plan.

“We’re drifting!” called out an alarmed voice. More figures ran about, their shadows stretched into elongated sheets of black against the starlight seeping in from the corners of the window pane.

At the fore, the captain moved away from the Pathfinder and towards mission control. “First priority is stopping these outages,” she commanded with a cool yet stern tone. Command came naturally to her, Reyes noted. Not a hint of worry or fear dogged her words.

Cora didn’t waste time getting carried away by the commotion. She marched towards the balcony where a huddled group stood in visibly anxious anticipation.

“Ryder, meet the newest member of your team: Reyes Vidal.” Cora moved aside to let him step forth into view.

_Which Ryder-...?_

The gaudy and debatably violet hair came into view when the rest of the crowd parted. He could almost sigh to himself, thinking that the tawdry color would always be the first irritating thing he’d have to see on _all_ those missions and _all_ those days he could expect to spend aboard the Pathfinder’s ship. 

“Reyes?” she asked with a surprisingly timid voice, low and less certain than the kind of arrogance and command her last name carried. “My name is Sarianna,” she continued as she stretched out her hand for a customary shake. “But you can call me Sara.”

Reyes hadn’t realized he was a whole foot taller than her until she inched closer. “Enchanted.” He grabbed her hand in deference to politesse and even topped it with an inviting grin.

Sara shot a quizzical glance towards Cora upon his greeting, to which her superior merely shrugged.

_Great_ , he thought. Reyes started to make bets to and against himself as to how many winks, jokes, and cliches it would take to get her to blush. _Not much_ , he decided. He had only spoken one word and already she showed a mousy hesitation and weakness to his frivolities.

“Main line power’s been knocked out!” The same vigilant crew member yelled in strained consternation from across the room. “We’re on reserves Captain! We won’t last!”

Amid the devolving chaos, the silhouette next to the captain stepped out. His rigid stance was unmistakable - sharp, knees apart, and obstinately facing the terror beyond them with a pointed focus. There was no mistaking such an indomitable shadow. Alec Ryder’s reputation preceded him after all. It was enough for Reyes to bite down his tongue, lowering his eyes so as to hide the simmering gleam alight in his pupils.

“What’s our position?”

_This could’ve been easy_.

It was a  voice he had already heard, revived from a memory that only played out in the drifting flashes of nightmares. For a moment the bluish hue of the chamber gave way to the bloody red of sunrise. Pieces of brain, a venetian rug, a man in red and black holding up a smoking gun. The macabre scene kept playing the steeled click and the shadows pulled with recoil as the pistol finished off the last of his thermal clip. Reyes hadn’t noticed how tightly his fists wound up in themselves, and how his breathing hitched to sporadic bursts.

“Are you okay?” Sarianna asked in a low whisper. Around them the frenzied voices continued their game of survival.

His vision snapped back to the suddenly mundane panic of the Hyperion crew as their ark floated before the still-menacing energy cloud. His eyes darted to her concerned face. The very same thick, heavyset brows he saw in the dossier, the same round cheekbones, but the eyes… _Contacts_ , Reyes noted with slight amusement. As garish as her hair, light lilac tones replaced the brown eyes he saw in the photos. And instead of a smiling face, her lower lip receded into her teeth. Her features readied to curl into a frown, watching him with the lines of worry he had never asked for.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” He put on a brave face, as they say. The same dastardly charming grin surfaced, and the mask proved useful. Or so it seemed. His squad leader could only raise a suspecting brow at his answer before quickly resuming her focus onto the ensuing drama before them.

_Shit_. Reyes did his all to keep the half bemused smile on his expression lest he attract more unwanted attention.

Around them the hushed voices soon waved over in raised, hostile tones.

“Alec _please_ ,” Captain Dunn spoke. Though her voice was quieter, she intoned more earnest and aggravated plea. “You may be Pathfinder, but this is _my_ ship!”

The Pathfinder on the other hand remained a staunch wall, deaf to her concerns as he looked over the cloud. The entire ship seemed to reel before it, crouching beneath the darkness folding over them.

“Captain the protocol’s clear.” The Pathfinder ambled closer to the dais of the bridge, eyeing the good Captain Dunn down with an unassuming firmness in his tone. “In the absence of communication with the Nexus or the other Arks, we proceed to our appointed golden worlds.” His hand gestured down like a gavel upon the last word. “ _Solid. Ground_.”

_The Nexus?_ Reyes’s shoulders tensed, unsure how exactly suppress the questions and doubts fomenting within.

“Alec I’ve got twenty-thousand people on this ship…” Captain Dunn made a rebuttal, or so Reyes heard. Her pleas were soon drowned out by those closer to him.

“Can you blame her?” Cora still stood with a soldier’s unwavering vigilance. Spine straightened, hands crossed behind her back not unlike the towering stance of her superior. Yet the doubt showed itself in the crease of her brows. She had directed her comment to the smaller woman next to her, whose own lilac-tinged eyes looked with motionless fervor upon the Pathfinder’s figure.

“My father’s got a point though,” Sarianna countered half-heartedly, to which Cora could only look with bemused silence. Reyes kept his thoughts to himself, neither agreeing nor disagreeing as the room juggled about the futility of such questions. Yet the squad leader didn’t seem to notice the lieutenant’s own hinted disagreement (or Reyes’s hesitation, for that matter). She stepped forward as if towards the limelight and continued, “Solid ground’s sounding pretty good right now…”

“Pretty good _isn’t_ good enough.” Alec’s words cut through their chatter. His outstretched arm pointed a chiding finger, hushing them to a wordless obsequiousness that only a stringent military man would require.  

Reyes looked to Sarianna, wondering how the wounded cub would come to lick her own wounds. 

“Yes sir,” she said with a back more rigid with fearful deference. Yet a slight shrinking in her eyes and the scrunch of her nose betrayed a tight lipped insolence. A type of rebelliousness, Reyes observed, that wasn’t exactly stamped out in puberty.

If he hadn’t been trained so well, he would’ve let out a slight laugh at such a poignant family drama. He instead restrained himself with more huffing in his chest, keeping eyes lowered to the ground to share in the awkwardness that had suddenly seeped into the very floors beneath them. When the Pathfinder appeared satisfied with her answer, he slowly pivoted back to the issue at hand. Captain Dunn had much more urgent matters to discuss anyway.

Next to him, both the lieutenant and the Pathfinder’s daughter shifted awkwardly.

“The guy doesn’t play favorites,” he remarked, mostly to deflate whatever tension had them on pins and needles.

“No,” Sarianna finally answered. Her eyes kept to her feet. It was all she could do to conceal the wine-colored embarrassment of her cheeks.

He thought she was to say more, but before she uttered another word, Cora stepped between them with renewed urgency. “Reyes, report to the load out bay. The rest of your team should be there. Ryder and I will catch up.” Though Cora had a softer tone than the rigidity she postured moments before, something in her pointed look left no room for a debate.

Admittedly, the order was a surprise but not entirely unwarranted. “Aye, aye!” he said facetiously, feigning a quick salute before staggering back to a skip. The commotion resumed as he made his way out and stepped back down through the hiss of the double doors. Even from below the steps and through the corridors, the aggressively bright violet of her hair remained in his line of sight.

Reyes traipsed towards one of the shuttle’s seats, looking out through the vacuous space. A seamlessness of black occupied his thoughts. They were about to go on a mission, that much was certain. What _wasn’t_ certain was their own position… or _his_ for that matter.

Foremost in his mind was the _real_ mission at hand. Reyes hadn’t exactly been told who was to brief him and how he was to proceed once they got to the proverbial “other side.” 

_If there was one_. There was still the matter of that… dark cloud, so to speak. A name had escaped Reyes for the moment, but no one - not even Cerberus - anticipated it. The Hyperion crew at least appeared in as much of a disarray, and the panic he had witnessed hinted at a less than smooth arrival he was glad to have been asleep for.

It was a haunting thought that dragged out the space of seconds the shuttle took winding its way through the vast tunnel system. He wove his fingers together, holding them together over his knees as he sat in deep contemplation.


	5. "...and your enemies closer" Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Pathfinder team arrives on Habitat 7.

_Six years ago..._

 

The sirens wailed as he stalked down the corridor. The network of pipes and girders were awash in a crimson light. _Someone did it. Someone fucked up_.

Arm raised with pistol in hand, Reyes glanced up and down. A single tremor sent him jumping back into the shadows of the wall whenever the sound of footsteps trailed too close. In some distant corner, he could hear the unloading of shells and thermal clips. A flurry of gunfire echoed tempestuously, making his ears ring in the cacophony.

 _No, not that way_.

He crawled to the edge of a corner and followed the navpoint on his omnitool. If the blinking orange light was any indication, he was nearing his target. The blip flashed in an accelerating pace, thundering against the throbbing of his own pulse. Each step he took led to more debris, to pipes broken off and shooting a jet of hissing steam. It was enough to send sweat trickling down his temples. Even with his helmet on, it was becoming more difficult to breathe.

“Hold right there!”

 _Shit._ The familiar click of a raised _M8-Avenger_ behind him stopped Reyes dead on his tracks. It was only his second mission and the mistakes were piling up well beyond count.

“Put your hands over your head!”

His voice was familiar, even through the muffled static of his helmet.

“Connor, it’s me!” Reyes didn’t dare to turn around. He could hear the other man trembling, the clicks of his grenades against each other along his belt, the loosened accouterments of his armor, and even his gun shook with haywired trepidation. “Relax!” Reyes was pleading at this point, but he mustered enough calm so as to coax his squadmate. “It’s me.”

“Reyes?”

Reyes’s eyes darted to the blip on his omnitool. Its impatient blinking had him on edge. “Yes, it’s me! Now put the fucking gun down!”

Connor did as he was told. A sigh flitted out audibly through his mask’s rebreathers when finally his shoulders settled into an ease. “For a second there I thought you...everyone-....”

The pilot didn’t give him a chance to start with his macabre retelling. “I know,” he said rather harshly. Reyes waved his pistol so as to motion the marine forward. “Leave that behind.” The two rushed through the corridor as the bleating of the siren waved in and out around their ears. _Leave it all behind_.

“Say, how did you get out anyway?” Connor trailed behind him, following helplessly without question. “The pirates… they got to-...”

 _I killed them all_ , he wanted to say. But instead he kept a taciturn focus on the prize at hand. The beeping of the navpoint was relentlessly loud, beckoning to him as his more panicked squadmate stammered through the winding halls of the cargo ship. _I killed them all, and I made sure no one was left alive_.

“We’re here.” Reyes almost slid to a stop as he came upon the double doors. His omnitool was shrieking by this point. The navpoint. The target. He was _there_.

“What’s in here?”

During training, Reyes took Connor to be a more  brazen and naive buffoon. A trigger happy fool, his survival was the most bizarre and unexpected twist. He had hoped that the Alliance soldiers and the smuggling pirates would all kill themselves in the fray.

“Something to help us escape,” he lied, voice raised over the sirens. “Quick! Help me get this thing open!”

The two men each grabbed onto one side of the doors, prying it loose and open through their sheer strength. The doors screeched as it slid down the rusted sill.

“C’mon! Heave!” Reyes shouted, and Connor obeyed with a pained groan as the two used up all their strength. Soon enough they wedged it halfway open, leaving enough room for one man to enter. With a sigh, Reyes leaned back against the door, relieved and thankful to whatever god was out there for bestowing upon him such a strong brute to help finish his work.

Connor did the same. The victory of such a desperate pull had his back against the wall, forgetting the panic of the situation. “For a second there,” he started in between hitched breaths, “I thought I was a goner.”

Reyes raised his pistol, cocking it as he pressed it against his squad mate’s temple. “You are.”

He squeezed the trigger.

 _Bang_. The same sound that rang in his dreams was now a reassuring tune.

The body that once belonged to Connor plopped down to the ground. The pool of blood that seeped onto the floor wasn’t even visible in the dark red hue coloring the corridors. Reyes took care not to step over it, lest he unnecessarily stain his boots. “I’ll be taking this,” he said with a callous grin. His hand wrapped around the now loose _M8-Avenger_ on the ground. “You won’t be needing it, where you’re going.”

 

* * *

_Present_

 

Sarianna was never one to leave a man out, least of all her little brother. Though he was born not a minute later than she, the technicality was enough to have granted Sara years of seniority privileges. First to learn to drive, first to go on dates, first to…

“ _Wow!_ ” Liam sighed in wholehearted wonder as he pressed against the shuttle’s windows. “Will you look at that…” His voice trailed off wistfully, more awestruck than terrified. Before them the _Hyperion_ floated stock still amidst a web of dark spirals, their small tendrils encroaching like seaweed as their ark drifted.

His excitement was enough to distract her from the dangers hanging low over them. Even as their shuttle buzzed about with an array and relay of commands between squads, Sara couldn’t help but offer her own admiration of the startling view in abject silence. Dark lines cast by the winding double-helix of the cloud seemed to ebb and flow like waves upon the glass of their helmets. _It’s so beautiful_ …  She tried to recall anything like it from her short lived career as an academic in the Milky Way. Columns of stardust, gaseous spirals, and even polarized gravitational wells somehow couldn’t compare. _Then again…_ Sara bit back an apprehension that had crept since she woke from cryo.

The squad leader was what many a seasoned soldier would call “green as a summer’s day.” An untested recruit, Sarianna never had the opportunity to exchange war stories or earn scars like one would a medal. Her days with the Asari archeology team were more a seat of privilege than it was experience, acting as nothing more than a glorified bodyguard with a degree in anthropology. Even then, the most show they ever made of guns was a first generation _Predator_ with barely enough clips to see her through a round of shooting at the range. As far as Sara was concerned, the Initiative was a _civilian_ project. Alec had emphasized as much when he did his best to wring a _yes_ out of her brother.

“ _What if you’re wrong?”_ The argument was centuries old by now, but in her head the memory still simmered in her ear, whistling for the same old pointless exchange. “ _What if you go and… and… something happens to Scott? Where will_ you _be?!”_

 _“Scott’s a grown man_ ,” was Alec’s callous retort. “ _Ellen was a good mother. To you both_ ,” he hastily added. “ _Scott doesn’t need another one, least of all from you_.”

Sarianna knew the plan never involved her. Her father didn’t even try to hide it. The truth slipped out from Scott, the timid and nervous one in the family. “ _If you had the chance to do something impossible, would you do it_?” His question came out of the blue, so to speak, but Sara knew better.

 _And now_ … Now she was squad leader, substituting for her comatose twin while her father got to relive his glory days in a whole new galaxy.

“What do you think it is?” asked Liam. She met the former cop and crisis response specialist just an hour before, when they had loaded the shuttles in the  _Hyperion's_ hangar. Brief as the introductions were, already he proved more amiable than most. With Scott down and the rest of the  _Hyperion_ crew on edge, it was difficult to even remember the emblazoned beacon of hope Jien Garson lit when the flock followed her two and a half million lightyears far from home. 

The question brought out a light from her puzzled eyes, pulling her out of her own wary contemplations. The light of the stars reflected flares on the glass of her helmet. Only the shadows of the - … whatever it was … - gave her eyes a fleeting reprieve.

“It appears to be an unstable mass of dark energy,” SAM cut in through her omnitool. Sara found the cool professionalism of his voice more reassuring than unnerving. Sure enough, she had more of a warning than Liam, who looked up startled when SAM’s voice rang loudly over the comm channel. Unlike the rest of the team, she and Scott were outfitted with implants and a biometric scanner not unlike their father’s.

“Interesting,” came Reyes’s voice, cutting in from the other corner of the shuttle. Fisher and Greer, who sat on the proverbial driver’s seat near the enigmatic recruit, jumped and turned to glance at him from over their shoulder.

The newest and perhaps most mysterious member of the Pathfinder team, Reyes Vidal mostly kept to himself. The few times he spoke his mind, however, gave Sara reason to pause. Neither dissenting nor uproarious, his pithy remarks were often followed by more unwelcoming silence, as if he waited on every callow breath and word they hung on for further scrutiny.

“What about it is interesting?” she asked.

Though the helmet masked his expression, Sara saw him straighten up from where he seat. Suddenly aware and abandoned to the spotlight, Reyes shrugged and offered a rushed blur of words. “A dark energy cloud so close to our purported _golden world_? Sounds suspicious.”

Again with the sardonic emphasis. Liam and Sara exchanged quizzical glances. Still, he wasn’t _wrong_ , or so Sara thought. The scans, the energy cloud… Six hundred years was a long time, but the timing proved too exact.

“You’re different.”

A voice in the dark. It was enough to make her stumble.

“Wha-?”

The change in subject and tone was enough to catch Sara off guard. She had been out of cryo for a good four hours, yet she was still reeling from slowed reflexes and a nigh unworkable capacity for… _anything_.

Reyes gave her a derisive look, as if pleasantly amused at her scrambling excuse of a semi-flustered daze. His golden eyes gleamed against the darker hues of his helmet. He always spoke in half tones. Always half-chiding always half-joking. Never really fitting into one thing or another, Sara never really knew what to make of him.

“Sorry, I-...” She stopped short of making an excuse and instead steadied herself. She kept a razor-sharp focus on the task at hand, sitting up so as to effect a more domineering presence. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” he immediately answered, suddenly wearing a more affable countenance. “I just said you’re different.”

For that Sara had no reply. Her eyes stayed on the cool glow of his eyes, treading with cautious glances. In truth, she found it hard to look Reyes in the eye, much less speak freely to him. The casual demeanor he so naturally assumed masked the more pointed watchfulness he gave off. Ever observant and always equipped with a witty observation, she found his droll presence more off-putting than untrustworthy.

As if he read her mind, Reyes laughed aloud as he reclined languorously against the doors of the shuttle. “I don’t mean the hair, by the way,” he added as if they had been conversing all that time.

“What?”

Again he laughed. Sara was starting to feel like a joke, and as squad leader, it wasn’t the right way to start off a mission.

“Everyone around here is hung up about their precious _hope_.” Disdain more than irreverence lingered on his final word, letting it echo across the shuttle as he clapped his hands together. He then smiled and folded his arms over his chest as if the last of the hard work ended with the ice breakers. “They’re either really afraid or stupidly excited, and you don’t seem to be either.” He bobbed his head to the side, grinning all the while as he glanced back at her.

From the corner of her eye, she could see Liam furrow a brow, but he nevertheless held his peace. Sarianna’s nose wrinkled with displeasure, not wholly appreciative of Reyes’s presumptuous show of camaraderie. “Who says I’m not afraid?”

To that Reyes laughed _again._ It was enough to have her simmering.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” Liam called out from across the shuttle to their now reticent squad mate. Something of an apologetic cheerfulness flew with his voice, sensing the awkwardness that threatened to spill over. “My name’s Liam. Liam Kosta.” He offered a firm and jovial salute in lieu of a handshake, ever so keen to include and be included.

“Reyes Vidal,” the other answered in one smooth, protracted breath. He postured lackadaisical over his seat. “Pleasure to meet you.”

A low thrum hovered over their voices, and soon the shadow cast by the cloud grew wider as it wrapped around the shuttle. Sara could feel the floor shift from under their feet, and the window that Liam leaned on seemed to shake.

“Rough air ahead,” Fisher called out over the comms channel. “We’re getting some chop here!”

The shaking quickly turned into violent tremors. The whole frame of the shuttle shook as the cargo rattled against their straps. Sara rose to her feet and held onto the overhead handles. Next to her, Liam kept that same enthused smile as he held onto dear life. “Just some turbulence. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Sara said nothing in response. _He’s … comforting me?_ She scrunched her nose at that, wondering if she actually  looked afraid.

Her omnitool lit up as SAM came back in the channel. “Gravity anomalies detected.”

“We’re clear.” The shuttle pilot’s voice radioed in through the speakers, calmer than the motions that left everything into a tremulous blur.

Outside the vacuous dark of space thinned out. A flare of red and orange burned brightly against the glass. Sara watched as the stars and the energy cloud vanished in a spark before her eyes. Nothing but flame wrapped their shuttle, and the shaking was enough to silence her. She could feel lumps welling in her throat as she closed her eyes.

“Hang on! Initiating atmospheric entry!”

“Here we go!” Liam still sounded cheerful though much less excited, she noticed. A selfsame apprehension of the unknown was restraining what joy he could’ve had. That, or the tremors.

A sudden jolt struck the shuttle, and the entire crew flailed as they held onto the handles.

“What the-...!”

“Ionization levels are off the charts!’

One voice fought over the other. In the background, she could hear the static of Shuttle 1’s radio trying hard to yell back at them.

Next to her a spark flew, prompting Sara to let go as she cried out.

Her eyes were wide open now, but she saw nothing save the shaking. Violent and tempestuous. She couldn’t make out the lines and the overwhelming pale gray light drowning out the shuttle.

“Hold onto something!” Liam screamed. Sarianna didn’t realize he was talking to _her_.

“SHUTTLE ONE DO YOU COPY?! SHUTTLE ONE! WE’VE LOST CONTROL!”

She stretched out her arm and reached out for a leather strap holding down the cargo. Soon she too rattled with the metal box, watching with panicked eyes as the chain threatened to unhinge from the floor.

Overhead, the sound of an alarm bleated. Its drum-like repetition screamed into her ears, even through the radioed echo of their helmets. A deafening boom then shook the hull, followed by a blinding flash.

“SHIT!”

A vacuum of cloud and smoke sucked out the entire window as it blew off in a spark. One moment her eyes were fixed on the buckle that held down the cargo, the next she watched as Liam flew and clung to the side of the shuttle with desperate screams.

“LIAM! HOLD ON!”

She jumped from the floor and reached for him.

“Don’t be stupid!”

Behind her Reyes grabbed her wrist. The three of them formed a chain, flailing desperately against a storm of lightning and winds.

“LIAM!” she screamed out his name, but his hands struggled to stay on the sheared metal as it glowed white hot with blown out fuses.

Another lightning strike, and a vermillion cloud sent the three flying.

Sara screamed. Her body was pulled violently, stuck in a tornado. Pieces of metal, panes of glass, and a plume of smoke. The confusion of it all made it hard to breathe.

“RYDER!”

Liam’s voice called out in a frenzy from the distance. She looked for him, for that squad mate who - just moments before - tried to make her feel unafraid.

_I’m scared. I’m scared._

The words wouldn’t stop. They rang repeatedly in her head as her limbs sprawled out in the sky, plummeting as the wind pulled her to and fro. Her shoulders scraped against clouds. Sharper and harder than condensed water had any right to be… _Fuck fuck fuck fuck!_ Her opened eyes led to the unsettling revelation. _Rock_. Jutting rock, sharpened and rough, met her as she scraped and dodged through the freefall hundreds of feet above ground.

Wisps of silver. Flashes of blue. Sara couldn’t breathe. Her lungs pulled taut in her chest; she was still falling; she was still screaming; but she couldn’t hear a word.

 _I’m scared. I’m scared._ The voice in her mind, small and mousy, was relentless and as deafening as the thunder around her.

“Approaching terminal velocity.” Another voice rang out. This time from her omni-tool.

“SAM!”

Her body twisted and spun as the burning of friction lit along the metal of her armor. The seams of it cindered, and all Sara could do was close her eyes as the dizzying spiral of her descent left her reeling.

“Initiating a manual override of your Jumpjet’s emergency protocols.”

_I don’t want to die._

A violent tug pulled her spine, and Sara heaved a desperate breath. Her eyes widened as the vertical descent flung to a new direction, and the world before her twisted loose as she plummeted at a new angle.

“SAM! HELP!”

More rock was getting closer.

 _No_ . Sara realized with wild eyed fear that _she_ was getting closer. She was falling to the ground. “SAM!”

Her sight zoomed with frightening speed. The white of the skies and the glowing blue receded. She fell hard and fast until nothing but rock reflected on her face. “SAM!” 

The last sound she heard was a crack before a void, meaningless and black, took her.


	6. Brave New World Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reyes, Sarianna, and Liam find their way to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: lots of blood and swearing and violence...

The last Reyes heard was a whistling screech of high winds amidst the crack of thunder before he hit the ground. Now he woke to nothing - a lightning storm bereft of sound - and the gritty taste of iron in his mouth. He would’ve groaned too, had he the energy. But his head throbbed with the grinding onset of a migraine and… _something_ was _surely_ lodged in his back. He tried to lift his back from sheer power, but it yielded nothing more than a pained grit of his teeth and more iron - wait, no… _blood_ \- in his mouth.

_If I punctured a lung_ …

Reyes kept flat on solid ground before heaving his chest for a large breath through his nose, and a heart beat felled the painless exhalation that came from his lungs. But a soreness below his ribs radiated from the motions. A slight stinging ache. Nothing more.

_Okay not in my lungs_.

To the distance another crack of lightning swept the horizon. His eyes looked through the still-pristine glass of his mask, watching for his smooth reflection at the fore of a gray cloud swirling in the sky above. With a smile, he thought at the odds of his helmet staying in tact, a thought that promptly made him shudder in thinking of the even more dire odds of his survival. _No need to think about that_ , he told himself. The sky itself was free and lacking in airborne anomalies, shuttles or otherwise. He was on his own again.

The orange glow of his omnitool lit up the moment he raised his arm. Reyes then threw his head back before spitting out chunks of blood - a mistake he instantly regretted the moment he realized it merely fell back in a splatter against his mask. _Ah shit._ With a gruff clearing of his throat, he made do with the less than ideal situation before him.

“Calling Pathfinder team… squad one… squad two. This is Reyes Vidal-” He coughed more, and the dark red fluid dragged out with his spittle. Reyes swallowed back what  he could and trudged on. “I repeat, this is Reyes Vidal of the Pathfinder team. Calling any inbound shuttle, calling -!”

This time the harsh screech of static disrupted the call, and Reyes was forced to let out an aggravated groan before wincing from the pain that speared his lower back. “Dammit!” He kicked his leg against the ground instead, hoping it would be more cathartic than it was painful. He was wrong on both accounts.

Above him, rays of silver flashed among the darkening grays of the sky. Thunder could be heard elsewhere. He watched and breathed, grazing his elbow against the hard rock beneath him as he tried to rise. He thought to himself and wondered if six hundred years, a one-way trip, and the promise of revenge could hold up to the disappointingly grim and all-too-plain sight. The floating and jutting rocks swimming out near the stratosphere were quite a surprise, he had to admit, but all the same the doubts crept in. Cerberus hadn’t come for him, as planned, and the Pathfinder team was scattered in their own hostile hell of a golden world. It was enough to make him whistle in disbelief.

The splatter of dark coagulated blood dripped down his helmet and back onto his neck. _What a wonderful day I’m having_ , he thought. He could laugh, but doing so threatened to spill out more from his mouth. Instead he heaved and winced. With the pull of his elbow, he lifted himself so he sat upright. The more he rose, the more pain seared through his back, blistering the flesh close to his kidneys.

Reyes paused for a moment and felt for the source of his pain.

_Great_. He could roll his eyes. A broken off metal platelet sliced into skin and muscle slightly above his hips - a piece of debris that he must have crash landed on when they all fell from the sky. Something warm dampened his glove as he felt around the armor plate. More of it seeped into the ground and his gauntlet as he pressed against the wound. _Bleeding too?_ He let out a hoarse prattle in place of a chuckle. _This just keeps on getting better_ , thought Reyes with that cavalier smile. _Oh well_ … His eyes fell on the blinking orange glow of his omnitool. Its radio was harrowingly quiet. _No use sitting around_.

All it took was one large, heaving breath, and Reyes raised himself up by the elbow. He stifled a cry from the pain by biting down his tongue. _There you go._ The same clacking laugh emanated from his throat, content with the small victory. Next, he pulled apart and unbuckled the armor on his right arm. When the plating plopped to the ground, he also unequipped the chestplate.

He then raised his exposed arm. Nothing save a sleeve of lycra covered it. Reyes then bit down on the end of the sleeve and tore it with his teeth. He continued and repeated, until the entire sleeve was gone. On his lap lay sheets and strips of ragged fabric.

_Now the hard part_. Reyes was never one to draw out hard and painful moments. He didn’t even like doing it to his enemies. So he did himself the favor of grasping the metal by the hand. Through the grit of his teeth, he pulled with all his strength until the debris was wrenched out of his back.

 

“AH! _FUCK!_ ”

He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes. A headiness threatened to overtake him, but he was quick enough to wrap the strips of fabric around his waist and over the wound. He tightened it about him before more of the blood spilled out.

All things said and (mostly) done, Reyes retrieved his chestplate and wore it over the wound. He then hobbled onto his feet, leaning to his left to set most of his weight on the unwounded side of his back. Looking down, he could still see the _Predator_ equipped to his waist. _Standard Initiative sidearms._ He grabbed it in one hand and took off the safety. Eyeing its white sleek barrel, he bit down his teeth and took this one blessing with a bit of a shrug. _A mere toy, but better than nothing_.

“Pathfinder team, do you copy?” He tried to reach out again, raising his left forearm against the static impasse over their comms channel. “This is Reyes Vidal. Is anyone there?!”

Still nothing, overhead, the barren wilderness of rock glowed with sparse shrubs of bioluminescent fungi. Mountains, boulders, and caverns dotted the expanse, but it also hid away miles and miles of land. _This is their golden world?_ Though Reyes never really bought into the Initiative’s dream, he at least gave purchase to Cerberus’s willingness to cash in on it.

He trudged along regardless, hobbling mostly with his left leg taking the lead.

_People. Medi-gel. Shuttle_. Reyes repeated the words like a list. A list of things. The repetition and simplicity of it rendered them mundane as he hopped mindlessly from one path of rock to the next. The air seemed too thick, even with his helmet on. All around he could’ve sworn he saw sparks just a few feet above him lit for bright moments only to evanesce with something of a breeze. Another roar of thunder bellowed somewhere down the valley. Much to his chagrin, it started to sound closer. Without skipping a beat, he quickened his pace and reached for the nearest spire of rock, stretching into the sky from the ground like a mountain made of bone.

_What the-..._

The shadowed hill jutted into a precipice that glowed blue with a circuit of lightning rods, broken down and leaning at awkward angles. A perimeter of them snaked around the base where a building ate into the rock formation. Its wall were sleek, or perhaps they once were, but now they were windburned and charred in stripes of charcoal black. Lightning struck every so often, whipping against the fortress with unrelenting force.

Reyes raised his gun to the side of his eye and pressed onward. _Alien life, huh?_ For a moment, he saw brief flashes of pamphlets regarding “First Contact Protocol” in his mind and wondered as to their uses. _I guess I could always knock._

He skipped on one leg until he found a path that snaked down the precipice onto the vaulted floor. A large freight stood abandoned near the downtrodden walkway. The wounded pilot jumped and pressed his back against it. With his gun held high he glanced from the closest corner and scanned the vicinity.

_No one_.

He continued and slithered to the next barrier. An array of them stood concentrically from the entrance, no doubt their former occupants’ hashed up defenses. One such barrier stood adjacent to an askance lightning rod. The pylon shrieked as sparks flew, and thunder came as lightning ate its point with earthshaking ferocity.

_I better get moving_. Abandoned or not, the fortress was sure to have a comms tower or a stronger frequency. He figured with a second of relief that someone should be listening.

Reyes bit his lip, wondering at how likely that must have been. Their shuttle didn’t make it past the storm clouds, and he saw no reason as to why the Pathfinder would’ve made it either. As far as he could tell, the team’s mediocre pilots cruised into the atmosphere all too readily. He would’ve spotted the ionization levels even before entering and-....

_Stop_. Again, he bit his lip, but this time he had to stifle a grumbling breath. _You didn’t come here to be the Ryders’ chauffeur_. The thought was enough to get his blood boiling.

As Reyes flitted from one barrier to the next, dashing as quickly as he could, his mind raced to the moments before their ungraceful crash.

_“Don’t be stupid!_ ”

“ _LIAM! HOLD ON!_ ”

Their words melded in his head and brought back the heady feeling to his stomach. _Stupid girl_ . He had no doubt that their jump jets malfunctioned from the explosion near the shuttle’s engines. It was an easily avoidable situation if squad leader _Sarianna_ just _let_ Kosta fly on his own and float down with his jump jet. Instead, the three of them had dangled like a ludicrous chain so close to the explosion that it no doubt blew their packs’ cores.

Above him, the air started to thicken, and a cloud seemed to hover low. Reyes sprinted past the last barrier and dove for the entrance, where cover protectively domed over him. The sound of thunder trailed after him as heat radiated from his lower back, and he could feel the fabric absorb more blood. _Fuck_.

Reyes leaned against the doors to catch a breath, sliding down to the floor as he threw his head back. “Stupid girl,” he repeated loudly through gritted teeth. _Leave it up to the Pathfinder to promote a kid_. For the moment, he found himself thanking some other inexplicable divine being for sparing him the vision of her unsightly blue head. Or, was it purple? Reyes rolled his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. _That’s the migraine talking._ He coaxed out the soreness throbbing along his temples with an exasperated sigh. Before long he stood on limping feet and interfaced with his omnitool on the door’s panel.

_Power’s lost_ , he noted. The glow of the interface showed severed connections and an outage through most of the building’s infrastructure. _The storm must have blown something_ . He mulled over the possibilities as he fiddled with the controls, inputting a manual override through the front door. Another bolt of lightning shook the ground, and Reyes almost jumped at the thunderous roar that followed. _Golden world my ass!_

He punched in the numbers with maddened fury, and soon the doors hissed open.

“Hello?” called out Reyes. Before him was an empty foyer with nothing more than cavernous darkness of dangling wires. He flipped on the switch of his flashlight. The pale column of light burst into the shadows as he stepped in.

The sounds of his footsteps echoed in hollow tones throughout the chamber. Behind him, the doors glided silently to a close, rendering the entire scene pitch dark. His flashlight didn’t help much, as it would either show more floor, more wires hanging from the ceiling, or a control panel that was utterly incomprehensible to him. Regardless, the power outage left him walking blind, and nothing save the free float of specks and dust clouding the air kept him his company.

“Hel-loooo?” he tried again with more of a facetious drawl. “I come in peace!”

Nothing but his own echo answered back. _PEAAACE. PEAAAACE. PEEAAACEEE._

Though he meant nothing more than a jape with the cliched opener, Reyes found himself gulping audibly. The entire foyer was large, that much was certain. He had already walked several feet, and he was yet to encounter a wall. Its vast and overwhelming darkness left him feeling alone, perhaps in a state worse than the solitude he often craved.

“Seriously!” Reyes yelled out. “I could _really_ use a drink!” Anxious laughter trailed the traveling sounds of his voice, but it all faded into the shadows.

Clacking echoes dogged his footsteps as he made way. With each new headway, Reyes would occasionally turn a skeptical eye or glance askance with gun raised high only to find no more than a low sound of dripping water or a distant clang of metal falling apart.

Soon Reyes approached a corridor that reached into a chamber. His flashlight revealed a heap of tech. Monitors, vestibules, tubes… and other nameless things he could spy. They lined the walls covered in a sheet of graying dust. South of the room was a large viewing pane, as dark as the room of which it offered a view.

_No one would build something this big and just… leave it_.

His meandering steps led him to the middle of room, where his back pressed against something large and bulky, pushing against his wound.

Reyes winced with a hiss before reflexively feeling for the bloodstained fabric beneath his armor. _Stop touching it or you’ll make it worse!_ He muttered to himself. It was always a bad habit of his to impatiently poke about wounds and injuries, perhaps thinking he could harass them into a complete recovery.

Desperate for a distraction, he then spun around and flashed his light on the machine. It was as incomprehensible and meaningless as the rest of the tech, save for the peculiar fact of its central position in the room. Before him, a dead interface panel showed an obsidian color.

“What do we have here…” A cheery tone tinged his rhetorical question. He raised his left forearm and established a connection with his omnitool. The blinding pallor of his flashlight gave way to the orange glow of his holographic screen.

Reyes’s brows furrowed in frustration. A sequence of glyph-like figures appeared before him. _It would’ve been too easy_ , he thought with a sardonic grin. True enough, it _would_ have been suspiciously easy had the tech in an alien planet in an alien galaxy been coded with language crafted by Milky Way races. Still, he ran what he could of his decryption program. Overriding a figure here or there if not forcing his own coding on the system until -

“ _Voila!_ ” he exclaimed, triumphant of his decoding feat. A click sounded out as the panel glowed a silver blue. Something in the machine thrummed before him, prompting the injured pilot to hobble backward. Soon the thrumming evolved into a louder whirr, and the machine appeared to vibrate as it intoned a high-pitched screech.

_Oh no…_

Reyes jumped back in a reflexive hunch until the sound whistled to its peak.

But the whirring halted into a low hum. A loud click echoed, and then a burning brightness spilled out over the previously darkened room.

All around, yellow lights came on with a snapping sound atop the overhang monitors and tech. Beyond the viewing pane, pale observing lights shone over the large foyer.

He stumbled with his mouth agape at the scene before him. “A… generator?!” he asked aloud, more dumbfounded than he already was before.

Suddenly, the same low hum that had started the machine sounded out from _all_ the monitors and tech in the room. Reyes spun around as he tried to take it all, eyes darting from one corner with each lit up machine.

“Everything’s live,” he breathed out in a relieved whisper. _If there’s a working generator, then there must be…_

Reyes scurried to a rush on  his good leg, fumbling about on every panel he could override with his omnitool. His clumsy handiwork would often yield little to no result, save for a brush of sparks or a dissonant baying of a malfunctioning panel. When he at last arrived at the room’s one remaining monitor, he found - with piqued curiosity - that the panel was empty save for a button. Square and shining. He wondered if _this_ was his magic communications switch.

“Well,” he shrugged out. “Here goes nothing.”

With a fist curled tight, he punched the button, waiting in the silence of humming computers.

One. Two.

Then three seconds.

Reyes waited more. He stood with lip biting anxiety. A few seconds more, and his foot started tapping. He started to do everything - _anything_ \- before he would throw the towel in. Yet nothing came save the now familiar beeping and quiet thrumming of gentle machines, powered and beating after what must have been an endless dormancy.

“C’mon… c’mon… c’mon!”

He slammed both fists down on the machine. It hurt his back to do it, but contrary to his last tantrum, at least this one was _mildly_ cathartic.

“Ack! Forget it.”

Reyes pulled the safety off his pistol and cocked it. Aiming square at the panel, he fired one blast. The thermal clip went off in a smoke, and the panel into smithereens. He watched with a sigh as wires jutted out and melted metal sheared away.

_Well, that didn’t do anything apparently…_ He wanted to sigh and smacking something, _again_.

Yet as soon as he slouched his shoulders in defeat, the room awashed in red light. The thrumming of the monitors came to an abrupt halt  and a deafening alarm blared in relentless fury.

Reyes turned and shot panicked glances throughout the room. _Shit_. _Alarms?! If there’s alarms then…_ His heart raced at the thought of an unhappy host finding an unwelcome visitor.

The pilot dashed for the doors as best as he could, fumbling on his good leg. The effort of it all left a heady rush in his head. On his lower back, he could feel the fabric sticking to his skin and the stinging ache fizzle to a numbing sensation. _Not good,_ he thought with the click of his tongue.

Reyes narrowed into a corridor, less familiar with dim lighting showing him the way. He backtracked to where he circled, finding the large foyer and its vastness littered with crates, debris, and broken off pipes. He opened up his omnitool again. “This is Reyes Vidal. If you’re hearing those alarms, you’re close. Sending out an S.O.S. I repeat, I set off emergency alarms and-”

A brutish force flailed his body across the corridor, landing on his back. Reyes screamed and writhed in agony as he landed flat on his stomach.

“-THE HELL!”

A creature roared and barked, bellowing a terrorizing growl as its claws dug into his shoulders.

Reyes instinctively reached for his pistol a few inches away from his face. He cried out again when he felt fangs dig into his other shoulder. Through bloodshot eyes and the rush of adrenaline, he spun and shoved, managing to wrestle the monster off his back. Without skipping a beat, he aimed the gun right on its head and squeezed the trigger.

The deafening shot swept the room. He was too close to the gunshot. His ears were ringing. All over, he saw nothing but red. The whole damn place was red.

Pieces of skull and blood splattered all over him. Around the room, the sirens blared, its cacophony resuming full force as the ringing vacuum sucked out of his ears. Reyes’s head was spinning, and it was getting harder to breathe.

His eyes fell on his most recent victim. A four-legged creature. Its skin a raiment of scales, splotched and hideous. And its head was an array of shattered skull, pieces of bone both within and without protruding where his bullet hit.

“First protocol my ass…”

He groaned as he tried to sit up. He could feel heat flow through his shoulder, numbed yet overwhelmingly hot. With a relieved sigh, Reyes relished in his respite. He looked at his gun for a moment before he instinctively reloaded what he could. _Ten bullets left_. A laugh rumbled from his lips when he realized he had wasted one bullet firing at an innocent panel - a wasted shot that might have caused this entire melodrama.

A clawing sound interrupted his respite. There, all around him, skulking through the corners of the foyer, more of the same four-legged _shits_ prowled about him.

Reyes let out a low cackle as he stood on his feet. Writhing pain permeated everywhere from his back to his shoulders, and through his armor he could feel the blood dripping with each agonizing move.

The creatures around him were undaunted. In fact, they seemed to growl louder the more he bled.

“Sorry about your friend,” he said with a cavalier smile. “Son of a bitch bit my shoulder.”

A larger one encroached and barked, seemingly provoked by his words.

Reyes kept a sly grin as he pointed his gun.

_Come and get it_.


	7. Brave New World Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reyes, Sarianna, and Liam try to find their way to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: lots of blood and violence, sorry.

She had smelled fire and ash before. It was the kind of nightmare Sarianna would rather forget, pushed beyond the threshold of consciousness where one could forget the existence of war.

It filled the air around her. Dark and dank as it was. The soft chiming of water dripped in some far-off corner. The echoes of it made the whole trap seem hollow. She felt lost in it, the blur of reality barely settling in.

_W-where..._ The question rang loud in her head, but it barely disturbed the silence of the darkness before her. Something heavy – suffocating, in fact – pressed against her chest, and the following seconds filled her with the disquieting realization of the numbness of her limbs. 

Sarianna shook what she could violently (her ribs? Her shoulders? She didn't know), and something budged. A slight click chirped, and a heavy, slithering weight draped down with a thud against her helmet. Even in the shadows of the lightless cavern, there was no mistaking the faint imprints of a lifeless hand sprawled across the deadened glass before her eyes. 

_No..._

Panic came first. It rushed from the beating of her heart to the sharp, tortured gasping of her lungs. It was impossible to breathe; impossible to feel as armor, arms, legs... they seemed to dig into her own skin.

"Somebody!" she screamed, her eyes frantically searching as she struggled to remove whoever...  _whatever_  it was lying on top of her. "Somebody  _please!"_

Yet nothing answered save the teasing echo –  _ease... ease..._

She could feel the heat of her own breath fog up her mask, and the coldness from the weights on top of her started to seep in. Her toes had a sharp, frigid tingling to them. And even her own voice fought against the desperate pleas that wanted to come out in her struggle. Tears started to well in her eyes, but something in her frightened state stopped them from falling. All she could think of was the final moments of fire and lightning; the screams of her own squad, and the explosion of debris diving down from the sky with her. 

_Dad..._

Memory failed her at that moment. She couldn't quite remember if it was  _her_ shuttle or her father's that met its end so disastrously; or – hoping against hope – perhaps it was only hers. Her father must be out there somewhere, safe and only mildly concerned as he searched for his only, barely living daughter. 

Sarianna laughed to herself, half incredulous and half pleading. Surely, if he saw her now, Alec would think her a disappointment. An emotional wreck succumbing to the cowardice of someone so green so...  _incompetent_. But something in her didn't care anymore. The timid chuckles of self-defeat slowly devolved into a cackle of resignation, laughing to herself in the echo as she finally caved in. 

_Dad_ _please, find me_.

"Please," she repeated aloud. Only a tinge of regret came with the word.

Her father, her mother, and her brother were all brave. She was just desperate, she knew. Desperation helped her then – when medals, terms of service, and recognition patted her back for more of what she could give. Now, floating helplessly somewhere below ground and caught in a ceasefire between fire, ash, and the incessant dripping of water, Sarianna no longer cared for the desperation that drove her so. She just wanted to go home.

A thud of boots thundered in the dark distance. Their steadfast rhythm grew louder and their pace quicker. 

Sarianna's heart trembled violently, erupting into a halt. Something in their hurried steps, the overbearing loudness of their movements struck her with terror.

Her barely awakened hands fumbled carelessly about her. They dug, scratched, and searched, racing against the encroaching steps.

" _Niad_ _shurid_ _!_ " 

They spoke with a bit of a growl. The words – incomprehensible as they were to her – seemed to menace the very silence that draped over the chamber.

 Yet a void overtook all sight and all sound. Sarianna homed in on the drumming in her ear. Slow. Heavy. She felt veins throb in her temples, and the dry, cracked exhalation of her breaths crashed like a wave in her ears.

Their feet were right next to her. How many? Who? The questions got lost in the fray of her terrified stillness. Sarianna could only close her eyes as her fingers tightened its grip on a pistol that slid from the dead body and onto her lap. 

_"_ _Niad_ _!"_ One repeated, angrier than before. 

One by one, a weight seemed to be lifted from her. But the violent thud of the bodies being hurled somewhere nearby left her paralyzed.  _One. Two. Three_. Three corpses, and there was still one protecting her; shielding her from the enemies that no doubt answered her call.

Tears were streaming from her tightly shut eyes as her lips quivered. She was shaking her head, or at least she swore she could feel them trying to shake her, trying to pry the body loose from the weapon wedged between them. She clung with all her might, breathing loudly and perilously.

Slow. The split second it took for them to pull the dead, helmeted body from her grip, and their astonished roar at their discovery. It was all a slow, grueling second.

" _Hakad_ _soh!"_

Like a dance. The weight lifted, and she rose both arms, finger ready to squeeze the trigger. The next beat landed somewhere between the alien's unfurled shouts and her panic-stricken decision to scream.

It ended with a horrendous  _bang_.

* * *

Liam found little luck until he came here. The whole place was barren, bathed in an ominous red light. He had spent what felt like an eternity chasing the one trail, the one clue as to where  _anyone_ was. The loud, bleating of the sirens still roared somewhere outside. There was nothing else left. One of them  _had_ to be in here somewhere.

He approached with more caution than hurry. His rifle raised, the situation rang with an unwanted familiarity. The smell of blood, the deafening noise of explosion, and the frenzy of confusion reminded him  _too much_ of a life he tried to leave behind. 

The flashlight on his gun shot out a pale column, illuminating the floating dust and the cold, drying trail of blood before him. There was nothing else but debris, low-hanging wires, and rusted metal. Given the silence, he could already be too late, but he  _had_ to check. With no one and nowhere else, the cold trail, the sirens, and the faint remains of a hope he once bore kept him trudging through the dark.

_Bang_.

He heard it again. It was deafening given the emptiness around him.

_Bang. Bang._

That was three shots. If the gunfire came from one of them, the ammo was sure to run out soon. 

Liam trailed the sound as he dashed for its source. The winding hallways soon gave way from their labyrinth corridors to a straightened path. 

_Bang_.

It was louder this time. Or, perhaps, he was closer.

"Take that! Fucking bastard!" The taunt was punctuated with another  _bang_ , and the ominous death rattle of a bleeding out creature.

Liam circled a corner. The flashing of red lights left nothing save silhouettes. One profile stood clear, belonging to the once strange but now familiar voice of someone he thought dead.

"Reyes!" he shouted out. He rushed headstrong, beyond relieved and beyond panicked. It took a moment for the half-dead squadmate to register Liam's arrival, for his gun was still pointed upright at some phantom in the shadows.

"I thought you were-!"

Reyes turned to answer his call, but something in his bloodshot eyes seized Liam to a halt. Confusion struck, and he knew something was going awry.

"Hey! What's wrong?!"

A blow. Thunderous and strong. It flailed Liam down to one end of the hall. It fell on him like a wave as he crashed against the floor. From the shadows appeared fangs, barred and salivating as the raucous bellow of a creature barked for his blood.

Liam's hands immediately grabbed for its jaws, holding them open as he felt his arms start to quake beneath its force. "WHAT THE-…"

He searched for more words through terrorized eyes. He wanted to call for help; to make sense; nothing came save a gaze towards his side, pointed to his abandoned gun. 

"REYES!" He called out.

He didn't have to wait too long.

His squadmate jumped for it. Limping as he were before scrambling for the rifle. He heard the click of the safety come off and the high-pitched whir of a gun heating the clip. 

"Goddammit! Hold still!'

And for all his caution, Reyes didn't wait.

Liam barely had time to react, much less to comply before an explosion of blood, guts, and skull rained down his helmet. The bullet struck true, and it left him besieged and dazed. His widened eyes could barely hold on to the macabre scene before him.

"I think that's the last of them," Reyes said in between gasps. Blood dripped down his temple, and his shoulder shook as he struggled on the ground. Liam didn't need a proper examination to see he was seriously hurt, pale as he was from the loss of blood.

"You're hurt," he said.

"No shit," the other callously quipped. Reyes threw back his head in incredulous wonder. "Welcome to Andromeda..." The words jumbled through his hitched breathing, pained and excruciatingly excavated from his low voice. "Hope... or whatever."

Liam could gauge from his bizarre smile that Reyes was  _trying_ to be sarcastic. Whether his own injuries or shock permitted it, however, was a different question altogether. He ignored it either way, prioritizing instead getting the carcass off his body and gathering what he could of himself.

"The shuttle... Sarianna..." Liam stammered out. "Do you know what happened? Was she with you?" His senses started to recollect into an unfixed calm. With his memory stringing together, he did his best to ask what he had endlessly rehearsed just moments before. "You were able to grab onto her before we-…" Yet even in the quiet of their terror, Liam couldn't quite bring himself to finish the sentence.

A low, protracted chuckle came through a fit of coughs before Reyes could speak. "You mean our brave squad leader?" He seemed amused with his own derision, despite the circumstances. "Last I saw," he started with something of a wearied grin, "was the explosion of an engine." He punctuated the statement with a groan before painfully turning himself onto his back. "Forgive me if I couldn't get a hold of her."

Liam's heart sank at the thought. Despite the relief of finding Reyes, there were still countless pieces of the puzzle to be recollected. Everything else was a looming mystery.

"We have to find her," he insisted. To Reyes or to himself, Liam wasn't quite sure. "We have to find  _everyone_. We don't even know if Shuttle One made it-…"

"That's all very good," Reyes cut in. He hissed out a pained breath before adjusting to sit up. "But I'm in no shape to find  _anyone._ " He clicked his tongue disapprovingly, as if Liam failed some sort of test. "I can barely sit up as is."

Without skipping a beat, Liam dug into his pack for supplies. He rummaged through the hurried seconds for what seemed like an endless pile of thermal clips right before he founded, at last, to sorely needed medigel.

Across from him, Reyes shot him a bemused glance. "You must have had a perfect landing."

Liam didn't know his new squadmate very well. In fact, he tried his all to repress whatever admission of annoyance or distrust he had. But – in the desperate hour of all their needs – he found himself getting acclimated to his abrasive sense of humor.

"Nah," Liam countered. "I was far enough from the explosion." The explanation was enough, or so it seemed. Reyes said nothing, and his sudden taciturn mood showed his quick-witted understanding of the events. Far enough from danger, Liam kept his jumpjet intact – a fate neither Reyes nor (for the moment) Sara were fortunate enough to have.

He paused for the second it took to focus on his not-so-expert ministrations. There were gashes in Reyes's armor, openings heaped in blood and lacerated skin. The crisis response specialist could only rely on what his training taught him: to keep his hands steady; to apply generously; and to ignore his patient's barely suppressed fits of agony.

"Give it a second," he cautioned before rising to his feet. Reyes seemed to take his advice and didn't motion any further.

For the moment, Liam felt lost in the haze. The sirens were still roaring tirelessly from without; the dark chambers of the derelict building were still awash in a panicked red; and Liam – despite his own meager success of rescuing a squadmate – felt just as lost as when he crash-landed.

"What do you think they are?" He asked suddenly, nodding to one of the lifeless carcasses strewn about them. Liam suddenly became conscious of the bits of meat and flesh staining his armor and helmet. A nagging urge to wipe off the detritus shot up his nerves.

Reyes shrugged, or gestured to something of a shrug. "Who knows," he said. He let out a sigh filled with exasperation and a gnawing hint of irritation.

Liam scanned about him, making figures out of shadows. "Did you... did you kill all of these yourself?!"

Again, Reyes shrugged halfheartedly. His indifference was doing nothing to sway the sense of astonishment from Liam. 

"There must be... six or … eight or..."

" _Ten."_ the wounded pilot's clarification was resounding. "I killed ten of them."

Normally, Liam would grant respect or at least some expression of admiration. But the tightlipped ease with which Reyes made such an admission called for caution. As far as Liam could tell, he had nothing but a pistol and the poor excuse of armor from requisitions. No ordinary pilot could do that, much less survive the loss of blood he must have suffered.

"Say, you must have seen some action," Liam began, taking pains to sound droll and inconsequential. "What was your line of work before all...  _this_?" His eyes darted about in light of their situation.

The other man took a moment to answer. Something of a wry grin crept up before he spoke. "Nothing," he said a little too quickly. "At least, nothing important."

Liam quirked a brow in disbelief – a reaction that he noticed Reyes catch.

"I was a pilot," he said with some hint of a confession. "A delivery boy, more like."

For his part, Liam remained unconvinced, but he wasn't about to contest Reyes's story or force him to dig up a now-buried past. Andromeda was supposed to be a new start, or so he told himself all those years ago. Who was  _he,_ even in the urgency of their troubles, to question that?

"Whatever you were... you did good," he remarked blithely.

" _Well_ ," Reyes corrected almost instantaneously. 

"What?"

Another bout of silence irrupted from the injured man, as if he was ready to drop conversation altogether and move on from the burden of their forced camaraderie.

"Whatever," Liam grumbled. 

He knelt next to Reyes in preparation to move him. Whatever time the medigel needed to set in, it was too long. Both men looked at each other with the acknowledgment that danger still lurked about; that whatever they killed in the shadows of the facility, there was bound to be more. "We should get going."

"Read my mind," Reyes quipped.

Liam lifted him by the arm – a movement that made Reyes wince silently to himself. 

"I can walk," he said in anticipated rejection of his shoulder. "Just move slowly."

He nodded before raising his firearm once more. "Do you know how to get out of here?"

"Yeah, I have the facility's map downloaded to my omni-"

A fast, screeching whistle cut through Reyes's words before it cascaded into a soundless calm. The siren, the red lights... it all went out into an unbearable darkness. Liam look around in restrained panic, instinctively switching back on his rifle's flashlight.

"What was that?!"

He could hear another gun click to reload a new clip. It was Reyes next to him. 

"Someone's here."

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at @pathfindersemail
> 
> Please leave reviews for feedback. Authors need validation, and silence is often the harshest critic.


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